Gordon's guilt over gilts

(and Dan Hannan for shadow chancellor!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs&fmt=18

Watch this and weep!

Why is it that Osborne cannot land a punch, whereas Dan Hannan, in a mainstream-media-unreported speech, manages to floor the Big Fat Oaf and, as of this morning, get over 1/4m hits on his YouTube video?

The Tory front bench knows full well the seriousness of the situation:

The damage The Project has done to the UK is horrifying. We have had a decade of systematic and ruthlessly ideological mismanagement, resulting in councils with millions of pounds of 'spare' cash to put into Icelandic scams, and 30,000 new public sector 'jobs' invented last year alone.


State interference in everyday life is more intense than it's ever been before, with incredible powers given to councils and even TV licence investigators. Emigration of the entrepreneurial class (capital flight, if you dare call it that) is at its highest for decades, and the country is being robbed of its brightest and best whilst the debts mount, and the government pretends it has a clue.

Well, there's no point flogging the taxation ass now to pay for it all, Gordy, it's dead on its feet!

Obviously (and it really is very obvious), Darling-Brown's 'solution' is
expensive nonsense, as they, and sadly we too, are about to find out. The breaking news today about treasury gilts being rejected** may be the first cry of "But the emperor isn't wearing anything!"

Brown shouldn't be away, annoying the polite and efficient Brazilians (who have a real, working economy). True it's a nice place, but somebody should remind him that the last notable Briton who went on a protracted visit to Brazil was Ronnie Biggs! Unless he has an altogether different, personal plan he's not telling us about, Brown's place is back here, facing the music, sacking Darling and putting someone competent into the post.

"Yoo-hoo, Gordy! Over here! There's something dark and very nasty oozing out of No. 11's front door!"

Yes, I know he doesn't have anyone half-competent to appoint, but he should still be treating today's news with the sheer terror it ought to engender (and showing proper remorse, but Dan Hannan has already covered that).

There is no law that says, by some divine right, the UK can never have its economy collapse. If the Treasury doesn't stop the state spending nonsense now, and start giving direct and effective help to the private sector, UK plc will indeed go under.

Forget banks and mortgages: businesses are closing at the rate of 55 PER DAY.*

In this context, should the populace want to string up Fred-the-Shred, it could be seen as merely cathartic entertainment. Brown ought to welcome the distraction. Perhaps we should have a springtime 'Burn-a-banker-night' to balance the autumnal celebration of Guy Fawkes' demise.

Yet I digress. I'm just a minuscule cog in the great machine of the socialist state these days, and my opinion is next-to worthless. Surely it's the job of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition to call Fascist twerps like Darling and Brown to account? The damage is real, serious and plain to see, so how hard can it be?

Too hard, it seems, for Osborne's lot.

Despite a league full of open goals, or whatever metaphor you like, they can't even agree amongst themselves, let alone deflate the other front bench with a pointy stick.

It's as if they're all hiding in a ditch in case something shiny gets dented or starts squeaking.

"Gentlemen, get out there and hit them into the middle
of next week. Do it for for Britain!"

There are alternative strategies out there, and they would work!

How about, for example, getting funds to people who will use the money, rather than squander it—the self-employed. Instead of giving it to bankers, how about a tax holiday for everyone earning less than £25,000 p.a. or just killing the business rate for small firms?

Short-term measures should be directed towards getting liquidity into the bottom-end of the enterprise economy, where it will do the most real good. Put what little resources we have in the hands of people who will use and spend it locally and carefully! Let Sir Fred's pension become worthless, while those from whom he has taken it get the help they need! Even if, as might be expected, the propensity to save goes up, the money will go back into British banks, not Icelandic ones! It's not "soft" socialism, it's common sense, and it would work.

I know, we mustn't be protectionist about this, must we? But that's really nonsense in the current situation. One of the things characterizing Labour that has really damaged the economy is simply not being protectionist enough. I note the unions are now at last waking up to this, but it's almost too late: We don't need imported labour when we can't afford our unemployment bill. We don't need imported goods when our own skilled trades and craftsmen can't make things for us because taxation and EU regulation costs are too high.

Now is the moment to call attention to the structural problems in the economy. Now is the moment to offer real, workable, sensible and relatively cheap solutions. Now is the time to take the high ground, and drive Labour into the ditch it rightfully belongs in.

If Osborne and fatty can't strike those blows clearly and effectively, they should get out of the way and make room for people like Hannan, who obviously hefts a mean broadsword to great effect.

Hannan's armour may well squeak, but if it does so, it's for the very best reasons.

---

*Government Insolvency Service number for the most recent quarter (cal.
4/08). It only includes the ones that tie up the loose ends tidily,
rather than just vanish, and the rate of increase is almost exponential
presently. Thus the real figure is probably far worse.

**http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/recession/5051738/Ci
ty-alarm-as-Treasury-fails-to-sell-Government-gilts.html

***Dan H's comment about this speech is on his blog: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/03/24/so_i_said_to_gordon_brown_i_said

A 21st Century Trojan Horse?

Could the Greek Economy end the great Euro siege?

Ambrose Evans-Prichard has a telling factual piece in today's Telegraph. Standard & Poor's list has downgraded the credit-worthiness of Greece (yup, that's the entire nation), because of its soaring public debt.

Greece in its turn is having to use the public finance equivalent of loan sharks to keep the lights on and (presumably) the Ouzo flowing. Its latest bond issues are 234 basis points higher than the equivalent German ones.

What does this mean? A 'basis point' is 1/100th of 1%. So, on new debt, Greece will eventually have to repay at an interest rate 2.34% higher than Germany. If Greece had its own currency still, that would mean its Drachma interest rate would be close to 2x that of Germany's (which, I understand, was paying 3.2% on 10-year bonds, earlier this week).

I'm not defending the British 'government' approach to this (see below), but one small saving grace is that, if we had to do the same in our own currency, inflation could operate to reduce the ten-year redemption cost to manageable proportions.

But Greece is in the Eurozone and thus it doesn't have this option. If its debt is bought by other Euro countries it is stuffed. It's true that inflation will reduce the impact overall, but the piper will still have to be paid.

You can, to an extent, understand German frustrations: their innate prudence means their public debt is negligible in comparison, and it's hard to see why, morally, they should put up with high inflation and interest rates just to pay off Greek profligacy. You'd forgive them, therefore, if they started lighting fiscal fires beneath the underbelly of the Greek 'horse', with a view to forcing a confrontation.

On this occasion, nobody, least of all the Greeks, is managing to fool anybody.

It is very hard indeed to imagine the Euro zone surviving such stresses. Either it will break apart, with the worst affected economies (such as Greece) returning to de-facto local currencies, or some form of EU economic straitjacket will be centrally imposed (Amsterdam and subsequent treaties allow for this).

In the article cited above, Evans-Prichard comments that this is unlikely, given the recent Greek riots, but common sense has never prevented EU bureaucrats in the past, and, viewed from the gravy-marshalling-yards of Brussels, Greece is a far away country about which they evidently know little, and care even less.

Standard and Poors is reported as commenting that Greek debt will exceed 100% of GDP in two years' time. This isn't a magic number per se, it simply means that, to balance the books, the Greek population would have to work for an entire year to pay off their public debt alone. Their credit cards, mortgages, etc. are not included in the figure.

Is Britain in a similar pickle to Greece?

In short, probably yes. So much has been pledged by Broon and Sweetie to their new 'friends' in the city it's hard to say exactly what we owe.

In Summer 08 I 'guesstimated' our public debt at £2.76tn*. This included the second tranche of Northern Rock theft but not subsequent robberies of the public purse by the banks, in which Sweetie was a willing accomplice ('Stockholm syndrome?').

Compared to the hapless Greeks however, we have one card left: Sterling. If much of our debt is held abroad (which historically it has been), and we enter a period of high inflation (which we surely will, soon), our debt becomes effectively worthless.

This, of course, presupposes we stay out of the euro, and that our economy is already wrecked, such that stagflation doesn't matter. The siren voices are already sounding on the former issue - BBC Radio 4 is in full euro-propaganda mode already with the Today and You and Yours programmes brashly on-song. This commentator expects Newsnight et al to follow suit over the next few days. The arguments for the euro are, of course, just as facile as ever they were, more so in a depression, but that doesn't stop the fanatics.

What about our public debt though? So much is being stolen now from taxpayers in the UK (and just given away) that it's hard to keep track. On the BBC Newsnight programme last night (12'45" in) , Peter Mandlesohn, himself no stranger to financial "leger-de-main," grinned maniacally and pointedly refused to say where it would all stop.

So how much more of our money is his government prepared to thieve away to the banks?

The clear implication is "lots."

Jacqui Spliff backs away from the weapon...

So Home Secretary Jacqui Spliff has now decided we can't have direct democratic oversight of our police forces. Professional politicians from all sides have rushed to support her decision.

It would be illuminating to know how many of the protagonists in this article broadly supporting her are Common Purpose 'graduates'.

Elected Chief Constables, along the American model, ensure a community gets the policing it wants, not what the politically correct want to foist on it. It's perfectly possible to arrange the law on campaigning such that a system doesn't polarize on party lines, but, even if it did, it would still be far more LOCALLY accountable than the present, arcane, way of making appointments behind-the-scenes.

It's depressing that the Police Federation has no view on this (or if they do it's not being heard), since they are supposed to be the voice of the bobby on the beat. As anyone who participates in Neighbourhood Watch will tell you, the good men and women at the sharp end of policing the nation (literally!) are tired and fed up with the power plays of their superiors. They want to catch villains and lock them safely away, not waste resources on 'cultural awareness' and homosexual rights brainwashing, and we want them to be doing that. They also want to be better rooted in the communities they serve, and locally elected civilians with oversight would be an ideal way to help everyone work more closely together.

How then can it be right that an 'überclass' is back running the show, and that this is endorsed by professional politicians across the board, unless there is some tune that they are all humming quietly under their collective breath?

Not for nothing does the introduction to the English translation of Corpus Juris describe it as a 'system of repression'. After the raid on Parliament itself, the Met. in particular have now simply become the Home Office's enforcers.

The biggest irony is that, with this cowardly decision, in a style Ms. Spliff is famous for, the police are now more politicised than they have ever been since the days of Sir Robert Peel. Yet another bastion of British freedom is placed beyond the reach of the ordinary people.

The Australian Monarchist League...

... circulated a weird self-congratulatory message (wot I'll link to later, if I can find it in cyberspace). In it they said:

Our Constitution and our Queen are now uniquely Australian. Were this not so, how else could Australians themselves determine whether or not to retain OUR Crown in OUR Constitution?

So here's an unsuitable reply:

---

Dear Australians,

Please, if we asked really nicely, could you just take the royal family
over to Oz and look after them for us?

You must have some space, say in the Northern Territories, and they only want a few million a month. We'll even let you have Buck House, cheap, as long as you're prepared to dig it up yourselves, and agree to take the Japanese tourists too.

Actually, there's a real business opportunity for you here: if you could find spots for the entire civil list, we might even chip in a bit ourselves, at least for the first few months, to help get them settled.

In the worst case, there are a few of them who would probably be happier in Argentina or Chile, which, we understand, are both nearby. So if they do start strutting about and wearing too much brown, at least you've got options. But then we hear you have your own Grand Prix, so they needn't be totally out of touch with their little friends, which should keep them reasonably docile. They wouldn't be too much trouble, especially if you give them some aborigines to oppress.

As for the constitution bit of constitutional monarchy, there, we're afraid you're out of luck, cobbers. We've been trying for the last 40 years or so to get them to understand what constitution means, and what their job is in that regard, but we can't get through to 'em.
It's probably just in-breeding: they still all look like the Kaiser to us (even the female ones), so admittedly that could be a problem. We even tried crossing one with an American, but that only led to a couple escaping to Paris. It wasn't a great loss, but it was embarrassing.

Anyway, as long as you don't let them near anything too fragile or important, and make absolutely certain they can't sign anything, you should be all right. On the good side, they're still fairly decorative (apart from Charles), and mostly harmless (apart from Charles), and are good on telly (but do keep Philip away from Orientals when the cameras are running).

You could do a lot worse: that Dutch lot, for example.

If you're prepared to throw in Kylie in exchange, we can probably offer you a slightly better price. It won't be much of a discount, but you'll have the moral satisfaction of knowing you're making the entire British nation (and especially a lot of middle-aged, British men) very happy.

If you're interested, give Mandy a bell. He's just been made a Sweetie Of The Realm, so he's as qualified as anyone else to negotiate on our behalf.

Hope to be hearing from you really soon.

The British People