Eurozone: "Struggling a bit, aren't they...?"

The two-handed satire of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe is new to me, but on this evidence - a skit on Eurozone debt in the style of Mastermind - I'll be looking out for it from now. (The Oz accents, I admit, add greatly to the pawkiness of the humour.)

The Rounds of Dublin

I’m just returned from 24 hours in Dublin, a city that holds a fair few memories for me down its crooked streets and behind its great grey facades. (Joyce got it dead right when he wrote in That Big Book of His about Trinity's 'surly front' and the 'gaunt quay walls' abutting the Liffey.)
And yet by my reckoning this was only my second visit to Dubs in the last 20 years, and the first since around 2002. This being May, it did, of course, piss down with rain; and yet cheerfulness reigned through my short stay – for me, anyhow.
Back in London this afternoon I switched on BBC News 24 and found that Dublin had followed me home, albeit most sorrowfully, for I was greeted by live coverage of the statement given by Mr Justice Sean Ryan, head of the Commission that has just published the results of its ten-year investigation of systematic child abuse in Ireland's Catholic institutions. Clearly the whole horrendous story begins in the 1930s (‘De Valera’s decade’, by the end of which the awful Eamon De Valera, a quintessential Christian Brothers boy, had somehow managed to remake Ireland more or less in his own grim image.)
Of the contents of the Commission’s 2600-page report, few will need to know more than what they no doubt would have guessed: that across six decades Catholic church leaders knew that sexual abuse was ‘endemic’ in boys’ institutions, and that physical and emotional abuse and neglect were hallmarks of how these cesspits were run by miserable, evil men in long black dresses. Well, what can you say to this towering iniquity? As Shane MacGowan once sang on a very different subject, ‘May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell.’
On what is a relatively lighter note: there’s hardly a lamppost in all of Dublin that isn’t plastered with portraits of politicians now seeking election to the European Parliament in the upcoming polls. These headshots are hilariously fancily posed and lit, even if the candidate is some ruby-cheeked old codger called Gay or Mannix. (The women, though, look uniformly fresh from the salon, not least a Sinn Fein candidate called Mary Lou, would you believe?)
Interestingly some of the parties keep a very low 10-point-type profile on said posters, not least De Valera’s old mob Fianna Fail, still the perennial party of government. Yesterday I watched Taoiseach Brian Cowen on television refusing media prompts to apologise for failing to foresee the economic crash, which has of course torn an especially gaping and ruinous hole in the Irish economy. I haven’t followed Cowen’s career much to date, but he may well feel that contrition doesn’t become a Fianna Fail Taoiseach, not when the office has been held by scoundrels of the order of Charles Haughey and (to what can only be a lesser extent if compared to 'The Chief') Bertie Ahern.
One man with his face all over town for reasons given above is Irish Labour MEP for Dublin Proinsias De Rossa, a personable fellow whom I met last night as part of my business in the city, which was to give a talk at the Irish Film Centre in Temple Bar after a screening of Ken Loach’s brilliant The Navigators, part of a larger season on the topic of Film & Work. Though Loach’s film to me is very specifically about privatisation in the UK, De Rossa gave an introduction to the audience in which he took care to relate its concerns to our current global crisis as it’s specifically afflicting Ireland. And the audience members to whom I talked thereafter seemed to have responded particularly to the film’s central narrative of ordinary working people being driven to do bad and self-abasing things on account of having little or no money. Today's paper reports that the Bank of Ireland reckons no less than 12,200 of its mortgage holders are now languishing in negative equity; so this story is going to run and run, like hopes and dreams and plans down a drain…
An interesting face among De Rossa’s Labour Party colleagues also standing for election is Nessa Childers, a psychoanalyst by trade, granddaughter of the infamous republican/espionage writer Erskine Childers and daughter of a former Fianna Fail Tanaiste. Apparently she recently defected to Labour from the Greens. Well, no-one ever quite figured out what transformed her granddad from a British imperialist to a livid Irish nationalist, so unexpected turnabouts on her part might be considered to have a genetic basis.
My 2002-ish Dublin trip had been my first since 1988, so I was well-placed at that stage to gauge the scale of the transformation wrought upon the place by economic boom. Actually, beneath a certain new veneer glaze, it didn’t seem so far removed from the dirty old town I had known. More steel and glass and public art about the place, for sure, especially on the waterfront. No more piteous child beggars on Grafton Street, but a great deal of conspicuous consumption, shopfronts 'gay with housed awnings' (Ulysses again.) And of course, tower after tower of luxury flats, a mark of progress that turned out to contain its own negation.
Still, what makes the Place is the People, you know. Some of them, any road. For me the best thing about the trip was catching up with my mate Damien O’Donnell, a top man who directs great fillums for a living: East Is East, Inside I’m Dancing, and my great personal fave, Heartlands, a neglected treasure that ought really to be better known not least in light of the ever-growing cult of Michael Sheen.

A Fool and a Knave

I believe we have the Financial Times to thank for the image to my left, forwarded me by a friend earlier today. Of course - as more than one cornered and humiliated weasel of a banker has bleated before a Commons Select Committee of late - no single individual could and should bear the entire blame for the blazing catastrophe we're all currently living through. Sadly, more of us have helped to stoke the fires in our own meagre fashion than we'd like to think - so-called good men doing nothing.
But, to be fair, generally, we had our own jobs and businesses to attend to; and I reckon if we'd had 250-year-old banks to run, then I think most of us would have managed not to run them into ruination, spending and loaning money that wasn't ours, pursuing vainglorious visions of endless growth built on imaginary foundations.
Moreover: the public has need of an embodiment of the third-rate evil besetting us - a pig's head on a stick, to pelt with calumny. And sometimes there is an individual at hand who happens to fit the bill handsomely - a fat pig of really gruesome proportions.
One has to observe that the ostensibly non-porcine qualities for which Fred Goodwin was (briefly) admired, and possibly even liked - coldness, self-assurance, contempt for those beneath him - were on display for all to see in today's letter to Lord Myners (and the blogger Guido Fawkes appears to have a vicarious admiration for selfsame traits.) In the face of such a performance, on some level one has to say 'Bravo.' But I don't think this show is over yet.

Hobbesian War of All Against All, Coming Soon!?

It's been quite the week for the mass forecasting of fighting in the streets among angry peasants with pitchforks. To set the tumbrils rolling, in the first instance will the UK really go bankrupt, asks Camilla Cavendish of the Times? She reprints the charming Jim Rogers’ assertion that sterling is 'finished' and we Brits should all learn Mandarin and head for China, or maybe Singapore, Rogers’ chosen bolthole. She adds pointedly that we can be quite sure Rogers and other outspokenly apocalypic hedge funders are ‘profiting handsomely by shorting sterling.’ ‘But’, she laments, ‘the nervy media gave their words considerable prominence, partly because a British bankruptcy is a ghoulishly fascinating possibility...’
Well, not just 'the nervy media', Ms Cavendish, but you too, it seems. (Perhaps she’d rather be thought of as a ghoul than a nervous wreck.)
Cavendish then expresses concern that ‘a vicious circle has taken hold in which sterling falls in value, amplifying liabilities, and bank share prices fall as liabilities mount.’ Yes, troublesome indeed, so one might want to refrain from abetting the flight out of sterling that Rogers & Co are so keen upon...
What, then, is to be done? ‘Technically’, writes Cavendish, in her view the government ‘has mostly made the right moves on the banks… The only thing that could push Britain into bankruptcy would be a full-scale panic. So it is strange - and exasperating - that the Government keeps inadvertently fanning the flames of panic.’
And how do they do so? ‘First, the bailout announcement was overshadowed by reports of Mr Brown's populist “anger” with the banks. This helped to spook investors into fearing that full-scale nationalisation is on the cards…’
No, no, this is getting us nowhere, surely we’re back to the fault of that nervous media, who have now gone and reported the wrong blasted thing?
Cavenish eventually winds round to blasting ‘Mr Brown's spending spree as Chancellor, and the remarkably lax regulation by the tripartite system he put in place’ and observing that ‘it is surely not long before Gordon Brown (Titanic) Enterprises are bought out by Cameron Inc.’ So we see where she's coming from, but not whether we're supposed to feel better...
Okay then, so ‘the pound is plummeting, the once booming financial services sector has never been weaker and some investors are losing confidence in the UK.’ Ross Walker of the Royal Bank of Scotland warns that ‘The credit boom went a long way to disguising the mediocrity of the UK.’ (One could say it went a fair old way to disguising the mediocrity of the RBS too.) But actively trying to make us feel better, and in the course of the same piece from which I took those two quotes above – a piece entitled ‘New look UK economy to emerge from gloom’ – is the FT’s Economics Editor Chris Giles.
The FT’s experts suggest that some of the elements of that ‘new look’ will be ‘a slimmer financial services industry, lower house prices [and hence consumption], higher borrowing costs, fewer migrants and lower growth rates.’ The ‘big losers’ of the current crisis will be ‘those who bought property at the height of the market or are close to retirement without final salary pensions, the newly unemployed and the very rich, whose incomes tend to be correlated with the stock market.’ So on that basis I would feel not so very terrible, but that I bought in early 2006. But then you gotta go when you gotta go...
Giles has found a particular booster for the piece's general tack in ‘Britain’s chief cheerleader abroad’, Sir Andrew Cahn, chief executive of UK Trade & Investment. ‘The most important benefit [of the sterling slump] is that our exports are more competitive’, says Sir Andrew, ‘and we are continuing to attract inward investment as [UK] assets are cheaper to buy.’
But what are Britain’s major exports? Aren’t we in a real poke here too, because of the sorry state to which Thatcher reduced our manufacturing base? Well, Sir Andrew mentions some ‘unlikely sectors’ to be cheerful about, chiefly security – ‘a growth area.’ He insists that security is ‘not just defence equipment but airport protection systems, protective clothing, and security advice and services at sporting venues…’
Oh Jesus, so much for the good cheer. What we have arrived at, then, the sum of all our hopes, lies in the silver lining to the global jihad...? I need a drink.

Aston Martin: Hard Times

For the November issue of Esquire I interviewed the formidable and admirable James Bond producer/gatekeeper Barbara Broccoli, mainly on the fairly rich topic of marketing of and product placement within the Bond movies. Naturally we talked a fair bit about Aston Martin; that firm’s long and fruitful relations with the Bond franchise; and the special enthusiasm for Bond of its current CEO Dr Ulrich Bez, himself a keen connoisseur of speed and gadgetry. The blue-chip, look-and-dream-but-don't-touch lustre of the Aston Martin brand is what has made it such a useful partner to the Bond enterprise. ‘Aston Martin don’t have a huge advertising spend’, Broccoli told me, ‘because they sell every car they make before it’s made, people are so desperate to buy.’
It seems that last year Aston Martin sold 7,300 vehicles. This year they expect to shift 'only' 6,500. Thus today the firm announced it was cutting 300 full-time and 300 temporary jobs, around one-third of its UK staff. ‘Like other premium car brands’, said Dr Bez, ‘Aston Martin has been forced to take action to respond to the unprecedented downturn in the global economy.’ Christmas break had already been extended a fortnight, which was rather a black crow of an omen. Unite has, naturally, pointed out that this spells ‘a bleak Christmas’ for those laid-off.
Is it worse to lose one’s job right before Christmas, or first thing in the New Year? Which has the most piercing effect on one’s personal and familial morale and the management of one’s household finances? I fear a lot of us are about to be told, if not to find out very directly.

Pre-Budget Report: Mark the Sequel

How do you like that fine old Tory campaigning poster (left) c. 1929?

Meanwhile, curious... Looking around the news sites this evening I learn that the BBC's online 'live text' coverage of the PBR was punctuated by citations of assorted bloggers, and that at 15:26 they edited together (rather sloppily) a chunk from my earlier post of today and stuck it up, amid comments from MPs and more regular/zealous political bloggers.
It's curious, too, to see the way this BBC coverage has since been combed by blogosphere invigilators, conspicuously Conservative (and calling their soul their own, one hopes) - one of whom I take to be the Mike Rouse who added a comment to that earlier post of mine, asserting that Cameron's 'bashing' in the polls was actually no such thing. It just goes to show that Cameron's Tories really boss the web these days when it comes to its coverage of politics.

I daresay it also goes to show why I'm not to be counted as a regular/zealous political blogger in the modern-day manner: namely, I don't belong to any party and I don't look at polls every day. I understand the latest from ICM has the Tories back up to 11 points in front? Over the last week I saw other polls had them variously in front by 3 or 5. But back at the start of October, weren't there Tory leads of 19 or 20?

Yeah, so I think I'll stand by my story - Cameron's lead has, on the whole, taken a bit of a bashing in the last eight weeks, so disturbing his composure somewhat, and hastened the striking of a few postures that he surely wouldn't have struck if matters had kept proceeding effortlessly in his favour post-Conference.

Meanwhile, the FT's sad verdict on the day's Big Question: "The route back to financial sustainability was unconvincing – both as individual measures and taken as a whole."

The FT also offers some succour for all those Tory watchmen who fear the slightest misunderstanding of their Party's no-doubt coherent, principled and undyingly popular (cf. ICM) stand in opposition to that shower of Scots taxers-and-spenders in government: "It is clear that the current strangeness in British politics of Labour proposing tax cuts while the Tories oppose them will be short-lived. The battle lines for the next election will again see Labour accused of increasing taxes to pay for its profligacy, despite the restraint implied in yesterday’s figures, while the Conservatives will face charges of slashing public services."

There you go then - business as usual. Now I'm just going to write a quick something about Guns n' Roses, which - with a bit of luck - might even provoke some Heavy Metal blogger/master of blogs out there to stick up a Comment in rebuttal, insisting that the best track on the album is actually 'Shackler's Revenge'...

Hey Hey, it’s Pre-Budget Report Day!

I have a distinctive recollection of what I felt, sitting in the big auditorium at last month’s Tory Conference, as George Osborne made that indigestive ‘grave’ face of his and asserted that Cameron’s (and his) Tory Party was committed to the principle of ‘sound money.’ I was thinking this was a very old-fashioned tune for a moderniser to be singing, but that presumably its cadences would delight the Tory faithful, and also play well on the news during a week when money, like many other allegedly solid objects, looked to be melting into air.
This week that tune is sounding creakier still, and yet at the same time no more ancient than the regime of John Major, when any weakness in sterling was held to be a mortal sin and a national disgrace. Today the present weakness of sterling is generally reckoned to be a necessary evil, per the Bank of England’s swingeing rate cuts. A weak pound offers a road to salvation. The Tories as a party seem to find this proposition terminally indigestible.
That Conference week, of course, was the last encouraging one (to date) that the Tories have enjoyed this Autumn, and even that was a rather nervy and rain-soaked affair that got pushed off the front pages by other Events. Today, incredibly, finds Brown and Darling riding a (shaky, treacherous) wave of momentum. ‘It is all very odd’, says today’s FT leader. ‘Here is a Labour government wanting to cut taxes, and a Conservative opposition braying nay… The government is taking a gamble but, on the face of it, it looks like the Tory gambit is riskier.’
I don’t believe Cameron believed any of this before his poll lead took a bashing… but it seems he’s now prepared to argue only for ‘fully funded’ tax cuts. Who can afford to wait around for that day that never comes? Meanwhile the Darling/Brown prescription seems to be a short, sharp fiscal stimulus to boost consumption (a cut in VAT, more income tax ‘allowance’ for the lower paid.) The sceptics will naturally ask what provisions this newly whizkid-like PM and Chancellor are making for our pathway back to fiscal prudence. As the Sun and many others are warning today, we the people are going to pay for all of this, fairly soon too. It’s all a bit too dramatic, really; a good job that it’s only our lives and livelihoods that are at risk here.

UK Recession: Escape Routes Sealed

My paper of choice, the Financial Times, has undertaken a region-by-region prognosis of how old England is faring or liable to fare in this recession of ours. By the by, it serves to remind one of what we actually do for our livings in this country now – or rather, what we soon might not be doing.
This week, 1.82 million British people are officially unemployed. I’m old enough to remember two lurches past the 3 million mark, in 1981 and 1991. But it’s no time for complacency. One David Frost from the Chamber of Commerce recalls what the devastation of the early 1980s claimed on a more or less weekly basis (“It was 4,000 jobs here, 5,000 there”): this because those losses were in manufacturing, where there was so much to be lost. As the Tory economist Ruth Lea said elsewhere today, we don’t do so much of that anymore. The impact this time will be more – how shall I say it? – generously spread around the occupations. Still, you have to worry in particular about the car-makers. As of today even Germany is in recession, even though most people like a Mercedes when they see it. So one can foresee the English making do with whatever is their current ride for a while longer, maybe just giving the old banger a slightly more regular lather-and-vacuum.
London, where I live, ‘has the grimmest prospects of all’ based on its ‘heavy exposure to financial services and to the troubled property market.’ And without a regular diet of property transactions, what do accountants and lawyers and bankers do for their gravy? Clearly London bankers have already stopped buying great swathes of all that flashy shit that they base their lives around, with the inevitable knock-on effect. Meanwhile, Londoners are feeling less enthused – is that possible? – about the 2012 Olympics.
What of the two regions I know best: the North East of England and Northern Ireland? Both essentially sustained by the public sector, as it happens, ‘which gives them a degree of insulation from the turmoil’ according to Alan Wilson, senior man at the Oxford Economics consultancy. ‘That protection may, however, be short-term, as pressure on public spending grows...’ And a lot of ticky-tacky ‘luxury waterside’ box-flats in Newcastle and in Belfast are going to stay eerily empty for a good while longer.

Keynes Resurgens!

Hang on to your hats: ideologies are back, and they’re crashing up against one another like not-so-ignorant armies in the night! It’s all the fault of the Global Financial Crisis, of course, and in terms of the chorus of conflicting op-ed commentary perhaps the most interesting development has been a vigorous revisiting of the legacy of Keynes.
When I was a boy Britain was stalked by 'stagflation': 26% inflation, the country near bankrupt, the IMF called in and demanding monetary targets and cuts in public spending. In 1976 Prime Minister Callaghan (how odd that sounds now!) read out Peter Jay's speech to Labour conference declaring that no-one, least of all him, was going to spend their way out of a recession again.
Come 1979 a zealous new Tory government was confirmed in the view that the rate of inflation, not the level of unemployment, was our chief enemy and obstacle to economical wellbeing, to be fought by sado-monetarism. (Actually the monetarist experiment didn’t last long: the Tories were soon in real trouble c. 1981-2, and they would need fortuitous events in the shape of General Galtieri and North Sea Oil coming on-stream to get them out of a hole.)
Anyhow, back to the present: Brown and Darling are going to spend their way out of a recession! The plan is to increase spending on public sector capital projects to compensate for the ‘shrinkage’ in the banking system. Seasoned observers had seized on this Keynesian dimension of Labour intentions well before Alistair Darling pronounced that the resemblance was intentional.
Now Keynes’ biographer Lord Skidelsky weighs mildly into the fray in today’s Times. He does a nice tour of the fragile peace we enjoyed until late 2007, what Mervyn King apparently termed a ‘nice’ environment (strong growth in big economies, downward pressure on prices thanks to globalization), the main item of policy thus being an occasional mild tweak of interest rates. No surprise, then, how long most people agreed that the market should be given its head, its inherently sound judgment respected. But as of September 2008 no-one in the world believes that markets are 'inherently stable.’ Thus Skidelsky's summary of our plight and what he rates the rightness of the British government's response:
‘When panic sets in there is a flight into cash. But while this may be rational for the individual, it is disastrous for the economy. If everyone wants cash, no one will lend. As Keynes tellingly reminded us “there is no such thing as liquidity... for the community as a whole”. And that means that there may be no automatic barrier to the slide into depression, unless a government intervenes to offset extreme reluctance to lend by huge injections of cash into the economy.'
Over at the Spectator, though, Tim Congdon wants us to know 'there is nothing magic about this Keynesian fad.' Congdon, I gather from the FT, is 'an economist and businessman, who served on the UK’s Treasury Panel (the so-called ‘wise men’) between 1992 and 1997.' And he's fuming like David Cameron at yesterday's PMQ: Don’t let this gloomy, chippy, hammer-and-sickle Scot off the ropes where I had him just a few weeks ago!. (Congdon refers to Brown and Darling as "notorious left-wingers" in an earlier life, which is an amusing designation of 'notoriety'.)

Brown’s bank recapitalisation exercise, Congdon argues, “is not intellectually original, it will not be fully implemented in practice and, to the extent that it is implemented, it will be a disaster. Further, no other country is copying Brown’s plan or behaving as vindictively as Britain towards its financial system.” Rather, it is "a policy of economic and financial sado-masochism in one country." (So what's the difference between what we're doing and what the US is doing? "The interest rate charged by the US government will be 5 per cent, much less than the 12 per cent imposed by Mr Brown." Does that sound sadistic to you? Depends on how you feel about banks right now, whether you're a 'wise man', etc etc)
It really irks Congdon that the government pressured the banks into the new money-raising arrangements by the THREAT that otherwise "the Bank of England would stop lending to that bank and so force its nationalisation." This 'THREAT', he believes, will not be forgotten: he sees a time when "internationally mobile parts of British banking will relocate to other jurisdictions and possible foreign entrants into British banking will hesitate to invest here.’

(This is only to speak of another form of THREAT that we have always lived with in my lifetime, i.e. let capital and big wealth creators do exactly as they wish, whatever the situation, or else they will run off and seek their safest bolthole in another far pleasanter country. Thus the thrusting City of London of which Britain is supposed to be so proud.)

It irks Congdon further that the mainstream media and people like you and me don't understand preference capital, and thus he revisits its role in the US after the Great Crash of 29 (if only to affirm its usefulness.) But he also wants us to be aware that what we've got isn't ‘nationalisation’ - so don't celebrate yet, you Lefties!:
"What the Brown plan proposes is that if the banks’ current shareholders do not wish to take up the shares offered in the rights issue, the government will take their place. However, if the banks’ current shareholders do subscribe in full to the rights issue, the government has no equity stake and the banks are not nationalised."

(If our ignorance is so much Congdon's concern he should have a word with his Spectator labelmate Richard Northedge who's fulminating in the very same issue about 'socialism seizing the city', how “suddenly the state has its hands on the economy’s real levers of power.")

When Congdon calms down, he basically says that his dream role for government is that it offer lender-of-last-resort loans and impose nothing on solvent and profitable banks. If he's so vexed then by what just actually happened, he presumably knows better about the fitness of the banks than Mervyn King, who said only this week that they were all looking like dead meat before the bailout. Lenders of last resort? I think everyone agrees the government should have moved quicker on this score. Even so, could they have averted the panic and pain we've all been having? The ever-vigilant enemies of socialism, Keynesianism and every other form of 'ism' other than neoliberalism say 'Yes'. So ideologies are back, comrades, and they're fit and tanned and ready for service...

Dave & the sound of the crowd

Another curious week for the main party leaders: The Brow-Furrowed Son of the Manse (who has appeared relatively gay at times over these terrible last seven days); and the man whom most young Tory PPCs think of as Jesus but to whom Simon Heffer near-religiously and sneeringly refers to as 'Dave'.

Cameron has capped it by going on Adam Boulton's Sky show and saying: yes, he would support the government taking a majority shareholding in RBS; yes, Brown did ‘the right thing in announcing the pan to recapitalize the banking system’; and yes, he accepted that accordingly ‘borrowing is gong to increase.’ He further declared that ‘it would be completely wrong for senior executives in those banks to get a bonus this year’ and, when asked about whether some ought to get the sack, remarked that he ‘would be very surprised if they all kept their jobs.’
So another robustly bipartisan show from DC, the stuff about bankers very much contra to Boris Johnson’s would-be stirring statements at Tory party conference the other week; and the stuff about state intervention in banks clearly not the message George Osborne would have liked to convey at conference either, at least before the initial collapse of the US bail-out caught that conference squarely on the hop.
It looks like in the main the Tories are going to sit this ruckus out politely, trust that in other respects Cameron’s strident efforts to make the party look a little more clean-limbed and cuddly will be judged effective, and that in the long run the electorate will end up blaming the Government for The Crisis. John Rentoul in today’s Independent certainly thinks they surely will: ‘We can argue about whether they are half-right or half-wrong to blame Brown for the economic difficulties that now loom before us, but there is no doubting what the majority opinion is. I expect that the Tories' focus groups reflect the views of the members of the public buttonholed by TV cameras on the street last week: they blame the Government and are especially furious that they, as taxpayers, should be asked to bail out the greedy bankers who were allowed to break the economy.’

Money: formerly the best thing money could buy

I had to go straight to Reuters this morning just to feel as goddamn low as possible, in this case with some coverage of the IMF’s latest grim World Economic Outlook. The facts, as bald as we know 'em to be - ‘the world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s.’ The IMF confirm that Europe and the US are in a special pit of hell, but China and India, if looking at slower growth, will be ‘supported by solid private consumption.’ Lucky them. But we’ll be tightening our belts round this household, no bloody fear.
Still, I couldn’t quite resist checking in on Hamish McRae at the Independent, since he was offering the headline ‘Amid all the panic, there is some good news.’ And to his mind the good news can be summarised thus:
- ‘The Bank of England can and will cut interest rates, which will make things easier for borrowers and for the commercial banks themselves.’ (A prediction Gordon Brown had the pleasure of confirming as reality around lunchtime.)
- ‘the vast majority of British people will be able to go on servicing their mortgages… the home loans the banks swap for cash at the Bank of England will not involve any loss to the Bank or ultimately the taxpayer.’ (I like this faith in the Good Old Vast Majority of British people currently renting their homes from the banks...)
- 'There is virtually no theoretical limit to the amount of money a central bank can create… The big point here is that the modern state has enormous financial power. Providing confidence in its own competence is maintained it can borrow on an almost unthinkably large scale.’ (If this is good news then I'd rather get back into my little pit of hell and wait for the burning to stop. Still, confidence of all kinds is what we're after right now.)

Ahmadinejad, positively gay with glee at the UN

Quite a day in politics. Maybe 6 out of 10 for Brown at Labour conference, I’d say - the usual sanctimony, with more polished attempts at levity (from a low base). In Washington the US financial institutions bailout is getting a hammering off Republican congressmen for being snide, unjust, un-American, and socialistic, and it’s certainly the first two: there must be another way to punish the guilty scavengers while protecting the benighted taxpayer. Meanwhile Newsnight seemed pleased to report that Ahmadinejad has once more reveled in the UN General Assembly's limelight in order to pronounce that ‘the American empire is reaching the end of its road, and its next rulers must limit their interference to their own borders.’ The first part is true for all sorts of reasons. As to the second, I assume we all know how hatefully hypocritical are these words in the mouth of this disgraceful little ratbag; but I do worry that certain constituencies out there think these views statesmanlike, sagacious and all-round impressive. Allah be praised, then, for Newsnight’s Mark Urban, peace be upon him, who drew attention to what he described as some ‘toxic’ remarks from the Iranian President in respect of the ‘Zionist regime’ and ‘the cesspool created by itself and its supporters.’ I trust all keen critics and opponents of Israel, well in charge of the copious evidence supporting their positions, understand too that for Ahmadinejad the Problem of the Jewish State is one arising from absolute first principles, and requiring a final solution. He should get back to his own little cesspool.

Saw the BBC News today, oh boy...

On BBC2's Newsnight earlier Kirsty Wark succeeded in giving George Bush’s edgy press secretary Dana Perino a much stiffer and ruder talking-to than she handed out to the seasoned (male) charge d’affaire of the Russian Embassy in London. Manners and predispositions, I guess... As part of the same lead item Newsnight gobsmackingly gave airspace to some young Russian twerp of a journalist, in a shiny jacket and shinier t-shirt, who tried to sound a lot bigger than he looks in dismissing the views of the British government as Washington’s poodle, etc, yawn.
Miliband did well today. The Telegraph reports his saying that "the sight of Russian tanks in a neighbouring country on the 40th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring has shown that the temptations of power politics remain." But check out the Telegraph readers’ posted comments (scroll down) if you want to get yourself massively dispirited: thin streaks of would-be testicular contempt for Miliband and ‘Bliar’-‘Nu’ Labour/pseudo-sophisticated hatred for the faltering US imperium/veiled admiration for far-flung Russian ‘toughness’.
Cameron has applauded Miliband for going to the Ukraine but tried to up the ante in talking to BBC News: "I think the only language a bully understands is when somebody stands up and says, 'Look, what you've done is wrong...' Prime ministerial, do you think? Sky News further report him as saying “Having Russia as member of the G8 at a time when her troops are still on the sovereign soil of another country I think is inappropriate.”
The 10 O’Clock BBC News decided to follow David Davis and 'shadow immigration minister' Damian Green in giving Neighbourhood Wardens a hard time, soberly repeating the Tory allegations of ‘cheap policing’, with a slight implication of the advancing horrors of the so-called surveillance state. The focus seemed entirely upon the punitive potential of wardens, not on their value to those local people who might know them as individuals, trust them and welcome them. Personally I have observed these Wardens to be of plenty good use to the deprived wards of Scotswood and Benwell in West Newcastle. (One Stewart Carse from Co Durham was the Warden the BBC hit upon to make his case in less than ten seconds.) Online I see the BBC reporting Damian Green to the effect that ‘the government should be freeing up regular police to tackle serious crime.’ Okay then, if you’re running on a law and order auction, you Tories, I look forward to your bids.

Having cast doubt on the government’s concern for our ailing urban 'communities', the 10 O’Clock News then offered some plaintive noises about people who invested in buy-to-rent barely-built second properties in Spain – now suffering from the catastrophe in the building trade which has followed the credit crunch as night follows day. For sure, I hope these punters get out of the hole they dug for themselves, just for their own sakes, but honestly, how many of us – in turning on the nightly national/world news at a time of geopolitical turmoil, only to hear about such essentially private misfortune – could give an effing toss?

China hungry for meat, the US crazy for fuel

A report in today's Telegraph tells us there is an OFT investigation afoot into possible price fixing by UK supermarkets and some of their major top-brand suppliers (of products such as PG Tips, Andrex, and Warburton's bread, all used and endorsed round my gaff.) Along the way the report notes more generally that "prices in supermarkets have risen by 5.5 per cent since last April, according to official government data... a 500g packet of dried spaghetti has increased by 51 per cent. The price of butter has risen by more than 50 per cent." As a student in the early 1990s I often subsisted on buttered pasta, and students are generally poorer today - massively in debt, like the rest of us - so you do the math, as they say... but the price of food is evidently becoming a problem for the majority in the UK, especially those 'hard-working families' who did so much to install the current government. The crisis - as usual these days - is bigger and wider and worse than we think, but most people have fingered red meat and biofuel as major culprits, the debate usefully summaried by the Independent here. And what action am I taking personally to address the malaise? Tending the moths in my wallet, as usual, and not drinking take-out coffee anymore. (Astounding rip-off. 'Fair trade' my eye.) As in the case of my cousin whose annual New Year Resolution was to give up bobsleighing and ballet-dancing, I'm sure the benefits of my rigour will be striking. (BTW, the photo - by Tim Ellis on Flickr - is of course a figurine of the old PG Tips monkey, before the brand went 'trendy', presumably so as to raise the price.)