In which our hero demonstrates beyond doubt that we often have far too much time on our hands. And things aren’t looking too bright for one of Mr Putin’s more high-profile critics. My advice? Avoid the tea

This is something I cobbled together after a trip to Spain last year. I rather like it, but that doesn’t mean that you will. Suck it and see, as they say. File under Artsy-fartsy.

. . .

Who is it safe to piss off in Russia and who is it wisest not to? Well, I can’t say who one can rub up the wrong way with no fear of reprisals, but it is becoming ever more obvious that Valdimir Putin, c/o The Kremlin, Moscow, is a lad best kept your side. That seems to be a lesson Chelsea’s very own Roman Abramovich has taken to heart but which Boris Berezovky didn’t.

Another of the money men apparently sailing close to the wind is Alexander Lebedev, who owns London’s Evening Standard, but lives in Moscow. Incidentally, he is always described as a ‘former KGB agent’ but I’ve always felt the word ‘agent’ to be so vague as to be almost meaningless. For most of us it conjures up the image of a highly trained killer who wouldn’t think twice about accepting a drink from you, then screwing your wife, but I understand the reality is rather different, that is to say pretty bloody mundane.

I don’t for a minute doubt that these guys aren’t capable of making a pot of tea with radioactive baloney (or whatever it was they used to kill the guy who ran ten miles every day), but 99pc of their time is spent pouring over lists of holidaymakers arriving in Moscow and St Petersburg and deciding who it might be worth trying to flog a timeshare in a mooted development in Odessa. Maybe that was the kind of ‘agent’ Lebedev was. The only other things I know about him is that he and his son Evegeny have managed to get the Standard back into profit, despite now giving it away, and the Lebedev pere is up on a charge of ‘hooliganism’ for punching someone on life TV. (See – if he’d been a real agent rather than a pen-pusher he would most certainly have karate-chopped the man and found himself on a murder charge.)

One man who has not been doing his very best to keep in Mr Putin’s good books is Alexei Navlany. In fact, he is most definitely a thorn in Mr Putin’s side and he is reckoned to have cost Mr Putin an ‘overwhelming’ majority at the last set of elections. He was also a leading light in the street protests which followed the election and the regular blog he writes also doesn’t win him to many brownie points with the Kremlin – calling them ‘corrupt’ is one of his milder claims.

Mr Navalny now finds himself charged with corruption and has appeared in court in a town called Kirov, which (I read is 550 miles north-east of Moscow), quite some distance for us Brits for whom a 40-mile trip down the road is an unwelcome schlepp. (For the record my weekly commute from Cornwall to London and back is 234 miles each way and I’m glad I have to do it just twice a week. It’s not that bad, but I’m glad it’s not much longer.)

Obviously I am in no position to judge how solid, on the one hand, the case is against Mr Navalny or, on the other, how trumped up the charge is. He is said to have embezzled 16 million roubles from a timber firm for whom he was working as an advisor. He claims the charge is nonsense and one simply trumped up to discredit him. The thinking is that were he charged with some other offence related to his political work, it might seem to obvious and that getting him into clink on a charge of corruption would not only get him out of the way but would also damage his credibility.

Then there’s the matter of a new law which has been based banning those with previous convictions from standing for election. But (and I am obliged to be fair here, despite what I think is more likely than not), all I can do is report what I have read on various news websites. But it does seem – this is my taking off my ‘impartial’ hat – that not being on Mr Putin’s side doesn’t pay many dividends if you happen to live in Russia.

Does Germany now really have an alternative to the standard euro bollocks? Who knows? But a fanfare please for . . .

Well, the die has been cast and it now only remains to be seen whether the much-trailed Alternative für Deutschland will become a political force to be reckoned with or just another nine-day wonder.
 The party is demanding – the Germans tend to ‘demand (‘Wir fordern…’) where we

 rather more diffident Brits might ‘suggest a change in policy’ - that Germany withdraws from the euro and re-introduces the D Mark.
There are related demands but they are all more or less centred on the euro, growing dissatisfaction with handling of the euro crisis and a related unease with the EU. The new party’s website list number of supporters – an impressive list if you are impressed by academic qualifications and academia generally – but they do seem to be almost all men. I counted only three women. Here is a potted list if the party’s demands taken from its website with my translation:

Wir fordern eine geordnete Auflösung des Euro-Währungsgebietes. Deutschland braucht den Euro nicht. Anderen Ländern schadet der Euro. (We demand an ordered dissolution of the eurozone. Germany doesn’t need the euro and it is damaging other countries.)

Wir fordern die Wiedereinführung nationaler Währungen oder die Schaffung kleinerer und stabilerer Währungsverbünde. Die Wiedereinführung der DM darf kein Tabu sein. (We demand the reintroduction of national currencies or the creation of smaller, more stable currency unions. The reintroduction of the D Mark cannot be a taboo subject.)

Wir fordern eine Änderung der Europäischen Verträge, um jedem Staat ein Ausscheiden aus dem Euro zu ermöglichen. Jedes Volk muss demokratisch über seine Währung entscheiden dürfen. (We demand the European treaties are amended to make it possible for every member state to leave the euro. Every nation must be able to make a democratic decision on what its currency should be.)

Wir fordern dass Deutschland dieses Austrittsrecht aus dem Euro erzwingt, indem es weitere Hilfskredite des ESM mit seinem Veto blockiert. (We demand that Germany forces the introduction of the right to leave the euro by blocking further contributions to the European Stability Mechanism.)

Wir fordern daß die Kosten der sogenannten Rettungspolitik nicht vom Steuerzahler getragen werden. Banken, Hedge-Fonds und private Großanleger sind die Nutznießer dieser Politik. Sie müssen zuerst dafür geradestehen. (We demand that the costs of the so-called bailouts are not carried by the taxpayer. Banks, hedge funds and big investors are the beneficiaries and they should be first in line to carry the costs.)

When I last mentioned AfD, I pointed out that in my view it is essentially a rather different organisation to Britain’s own UKIP, but it does pose the same threat to the established parties many of whose traditional supporters might be disenchanted with Germany’s self-imposed role of trying to sort out the euro crisis. And that might well mean protest votes come September when the countries goes to the polls. Certainly, all three parties (who are all staunchly behind Angela Merkel’s policies on solving the euro crisis, one of AfD’s major gripes – what representation do those who don’t agree with Merkel have in parliament? they ask pertinently) do not seem to be underestimating the potential threat posed by Afd.

Patrick Döring the general secretary of Germany’s third party, the FDP, is quoted as saying: ‘I even find it disturbing that a body can be formed which is able to give the impression that Germany could change its currency without damaging the savings and wealth of her citizens just like that. It’s a little more complex.’ One of the CDU’s head honchos in Hesse, Christean Wagner, has said: ‘Leaving the euro, which the AfD is demanding, would be a leap back into the previous millennium. To make leaving the euro the central tenet of your manifesto demonstrates: these are yesterday’s people.’

Döring makes a reasonably good point, but Wagner sounds a little desperate. Even weaker is this from the SDP’s president of Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil, who notes that he doesn’t believe the AfD’s stance is ‘very promisng’ and that ‘most people’ knew ‘what Europe and the European Union offered them’.

Where others have warned that the new party will be a refuge for dissidents from both the extreme Right and extreme Left, but AfD seems to be aware of this danger and has insisted that former members of the NDP, the Nationaldemokratishe Partei Deutschlands who would call themselves national socialists if it were not a criminal offence in Germany, will not be allowed to join. To which I can only say: good luck. That pledge is more PR than anything else as rooting out former (or even current) Nazi sympathisers would be a full-time job.

As, of course, would be rooting out left extremists if they thought joining up would in some way prove useful to the cause. The AfD has announced it will put up candidates for September’s election so we can expect a great many dirty tricks as the other three play it safe and resort to skulduggery to neutralise them,  whether or not they pose a real threat. I predict that at least two of the AfD’s candidates will step down because their opponents have revealed tax irregularities in their affairs; one will have his past as a rent boy exposed, will brazen it out, but will eventually give in to party pressure to throw in the towel; one will defect to another party; and one will be exposed by the Spiegel as a BND plant. Or was he? Yes, it will be that kind of murky shenanigans: however much I love them, rather like their national football side, the Germans turn dirty remarkably quickly when the going gets rough.

Another, to my mind relevant, criticism of the Afd – and one which can also be levelled at UKIP – is that its other policies, on transports, say, or health, education, welfare and the rest, don’t seem just ill-defined but non-existent. Getting Germany out of the euro seems to be the alpha and omega of its existence, and in that sense it and UKIP are pressure groups rather than political parties.

As you all know only to well, I am just another internet loudmouth and have absolutely no special knowledge on these matters. Bear that in mind when I say that however much I might applaud the sentiments of AfD, I am sadly inclined to predict that by this time next year it will be a minor footnote in history. But the very existence of the party might lead all three of Germany’s parties to rethink their policies a little if in opinion polls leading up to September’s vote AfD gives a reasonable account of itself. And if that does lead them to treat the whole euro mess with a little more thought and humanity, at least the AfD will have achieved something.

It’s true is it? It’s a fact is it? How do you know? Read it on the web, did you? Well, must be true then, eh? Whales can sing Dixie through their bottoms? Who’d have thought it? On the web was it? Funny what you find out.

I read somewhere recently that when the printing press was invented, those who called the shots were extremely worried that the end of the world was nigh. This was bad news. Their reasoning was that information, disinformation and outright rubbish could now be circulated far more easily and their authority would come under attack.

Well, they are right about the far wider circulation of information, disinformation and outright rubbish, but when and where their authority came under attack cannot simply be put down to the invention of the printing press and the good work done by Mr Gutenburg in Germany and Mr Caxton here in Britain (who, by the way, was not a printer by trade at all but an astute businessman formerly based in Flanders who had his finger in many pies and, broadly, invested in the future of the printing press. That Caxton is now widely credited with ‘inventing’ printing might well demonstrate that the fears of those who thought the invention could possibly lead to the public being misled by disinformation and outright untruths were not necessarily Establishment paranoia).

Those calling the shot were worried, of course, because the feudal way of doing things meant that they, a minority, garnered all the goodies and everyone else was merely required to ask what most recent shots had been called. The Church was a major part of the Establishment, as powerful as, and in some ways arguably even more powerful than, the Court. One reason why they were so much against the Bible being translated from Latin into vulgar tongues was because they were keen to preserve their role as the exclusive interpreter of ‘God’s word’. Making ‘God’s word’ more accessible to ordinary folk was, of course, exactly why the various translators set about their work.

In fact, as almost all sociology bores will confirm - at great length if you give them half a chance, so watch your step - was that the invention of printing was a Good Thing overall. For one thing it made literacy and education possible that were the undoubted prerequisite for  the growth of democracy (defined by many as exploitation of the people by the people). That it also made possible such literary gems as Mein Kampf and the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion is also true, but to mention them is simple adolescent mischief.

That was then and this is now. The world and its prejudices have lived with printing for the best part of 800 years, and it was about time for a change. And that change came along around 15 years ago with the development of the internet. In those heady pioneering days it was still referred to as the ‘information superhighway’, though anyone using that phrase today would be mocked so much he or she would dare not show their face in public for at least a year.

But heady days being heady days and all kinds of nerds and geeks getting overexcited at the prospect of ‘worldwide communication’ - why didn’t they make that claim for radio? - the internet was trailed for a few short years as the key to freedom: there would be no stopping democracy, it was predicted, as information and news would spread across the planet at the speed of light (or electricity, I can’t remember: aren’t they essentially both the same? Something like that) and there would be no stopping it. Tyrants everywhere, the message went out, your days are numbered!

Well, call me an old cynic (or even a handsome cynic, if you like) but it didn’t pan out that way. Repressive states weren’t born yesterday, and governments who are not as keen as some on their folk being able to access everything available on the net are more than able to block access whenever they choose. They have also quickly become adept at monitoring web traffic and utilise algorithms to spot keywords and phrases which might merit a site being scrutinised a more closely.

So if, for example, I were to write something like ‘that Al Qaeda, now there’s a man who knows how to put on a show. His last went like a bomb apparently, and he’s become something of an underground sensation’, the chances are that some bright herbert in GCHQ in Cheltenham will have a little red light blinking furiously on his desk and the message ‘potential terrorist alert, check out, check out!) flashing on his screen. CCHQ software will have picked up on ‘al qaeda’, ‘bomb’, ‘underground’ and ‘GCHQ’ all in the same sentence and decided to take a closer look (or not. I’m not that conceited, but I think you get my drift). And in the grand scheme of things, I’m rather glad they are on the ball. So much for the spread of information enabling democracy to spread.

But what the ‘information superhighway’ is also doing very successfully - apart from making rich pornographers even richer and helping crooks come up with ever more ways of parting fools and their money - is spreading disinformation and outright rubbish. So where before it cost me an arm and a leg to publish and have printed a book outlining my the ‘facts’ that house mice are, in fact, alien beings come to spy on us and prepare the ground for an invasion of super rodents, these days I can publicise that belief at a fraction of the cost merely by posting a website.

Furthermore, it won’t be long before someone else who has long suspected that that is exactly what mice are up to but who lacked the ‘proof’ for his suspicion comes across my website and tells himself - it is, sadly, usually ‘himself’ as most women are too busy buying shoes and chocolate to bother much with the net - ‘ah ha! I knew it! Finally the proof! I knew they were up so something and now someone has shown us exactly what’s going on!’ He might then even copy and paste the text and images on your website to a website he has created, so that now there is not just one website ‘proving’ the existence of evil, subversive alien mice but two! And if two more bods do the same, soon there will be four, then 16 and on it will go until every alien mice conspiracy theorist worldwide will point to the number of websites backing up his suspicion - all carrying the same ‘facts’, of course - and tell his friends: ‘Look, they can’t all be wrong, can they?’

The same thing could - and can - happen with books, of course, and still does, but given that the net demands less of us in the way of paying attention than your average book, and, furthermore, is accessible almost anywhere, it is proving more successful. But the moral is the same: whether it’s something someone has told you, something your read in a newspaper or book, or something you found on the net, use your judgment. If you have no way of knowing just how true it is and how reliable the sources are, withhold judgment. Complete rubbish can also travel at the speed of light.

. . .

All this occurred to me when I was chasing up info about the nation’s favourite paedophile Jimmy Savile and claims he was linked to a paedophile ring which also involved prominent politicians, civil servants, judges and the rest and that they had all closed ranks and were protecting one another (as you would, of course - if one goes, they will all go). I was particularly interested in claims now doing the rounds that Ted Heath as was, one of Britain’s least successful Prime Ministers, was also into little boys and associated with Savile. Most recent, although on radio in Bristol, one bright spark, a barrister called Michael Shrimpton, has claimed that Heath would have young lads delivered to his yacht, have his evil way with them, then have them murdered and thrown overboard. Outlandish claim? Of course, and pretty incredible (as in extremely difficult, if not impossible, to believe rather than in the old hippy ‘far out, man’ sense of ‘incredible’). But Mr Shrimpton is most certainly making that claim. Just google ‘ted heath michael shrimpton’ to find out.

Other prominent names, many mentioned in connection with a gay brothel in Elm House, Rocks Lane, Barnes, include Conservative MP and Thatcher confidant Peter Morrison (now dead), bloody awful pop star, self-styled Christian and ageing Peter Pan Cliff Richard (not yet dead) and former Tory minister and EC commissioner Leon Brittan (not yet dead). Now, I have no way of knowing whether what is claimed about those gentlemen is true, although there now seems little doubt the Morrison was a wrong ‘un. The point is that all three names, as well as several others, are prominently mentioned on any number of website, and anyone visiting such a site might well go away with the firm impression that with so many independent websites all saying the same thing, everything must be true beyond any doubt. But of course it isn’t.

A few months ago, the BBC got itself into a terrible mess by publicly announcing that one Lord McAlpine, a Conservative politician, had been named by one victim of paedophilia as his abuser. Twenty-four hours later came the pofaced retraction: Awfully sorry, chaps, we got that one rather wrong. It wasn’t Lord McAlpine at all, but his cousin. Yet the damage had been done, and to this day someone somewhere searching the net for references to Tory paedophiles will come across the reference to Lord McAlpine being an abuser and believe it to be fact. Dangerous or what?

What is equally worrying is that once you’ve looked up and read through several of these websites, all purporting to be chasing down ‘the truth’, it dawns on you that the widespread practice that all of them is simply to copy and paste what is in one website into your own. Thus the number of ‘sources’ for a ‘fact’ are doubled, quadrupled, multiplied eightfold, then sixteenfold, then on and on in a matter of weeks. And there are plenty of gullible people out there prepared to believe anything about anyone, and the nastier it is, the better. So much for research (and, I’ll add so-called ‘citizen journalism’).

A given ‘fact’ might well be true. There again it might be complete bollocks, but to the anti-paedophile zealot (which to my ears sounds just as phoney as an ‘anti-death zealot’ - is anyone, except paedophiles, actually in favour of paedophilia?) that is not the point: it has appeared on someone’s website as ‘fact’, this guy is on the side of the angels (‘he’s against fucking cunt paedophiles, innit, so he’s got to be right, innit?’) so it’s all done and dusted. The giveaway is that it is almost always word-for-word.

Try it yourself: google, say, “jimmy savile” “paedophile ring” “cabinet minister” and you’ll come across any number of blogs about the subject all cross-referencing to each other and many carrying word for word the same content. You’ll also find many pointing you to the blog published by Nutter-in-Chief David Icke, who, in my view, gives fruitcakes a bad name.

All this is, of course, a long way off discussing what went on at Elm House, various children’s homes in North Wales and the Jersey, Jimmy Savile, a long list of paedophiles and alleged paedophiles and the rest. And as I’ve got nothing new to add, I shan’t discuss it. I also suspect that, in view of some developments - coppers being taken off the case, files going missing, odd inquest verdicts and the like - there is a widespread cover-up, but I have no proof whatsoever. I should make that clear. The point of this entry is to repeat what is all-too-often forgotten: there’s a lot of crap out there on the net and be very careful what you decided to believe.

. . .

Here’s an example of how what is on the net can very often be top-dollar 24-carat bollocks: copy this (from the start of the double inverted commas to the end of the second set) “andrew marr” “tearound tessa”, then paste it into Google (other search engines are available ©BBC) and see what you come up with. You should come up with 3,630 results explaining that ‘Tearound Tessa’ was ‘jocular nickname’ Andrew Marr earned himself when he was working at the Economist ‘because of his enthusiasm for trips to the canteen on behalf of his colleagues.’

Websites giving that explanation include The Tatler (which writes of ‘his keenness to trot back and forth from the canteen’), Blurb Wire (‘Current news and events for high maintenance minds’ - their own rather self-regarding description, I’m so glad I don’t have a high maintenance mind), Topic Hawk and Scoop Web (ooh, ‘scoop’ eh, sounds good!)

Unfortunately, it’s complete crap. Marr never earned himself that nickname, never told anyone he did and, as far as I know, never used to ‘trot back and forth’ to the canteen to get cups of tea for his workmates. How do I know? I know because I made it up. I did so several years ago and added it - mischievously rather than maliciously - to Marr’s Wikipedia entry. And every other website which refers to that particular ‘fact’ merely cribbed it off Wikipedia - ALL of them.

The ‘fact’ that Marr was once nicknamed ‘Tearound Tessa’ will undoubtedly appear in years to come in many an authoritative biography of the man or at least his obit and appreciations by colleagues once he pops his clogs. But its bollocks. I made it

up. And while I’m in confessional mood, don’t ever believe the ‘fact’ that the great and good Simon Heffer ‘once had a brief flirtation with the hard left in his teenage years’. That’s what his Wikipedia entry proclaims as now do also any number of potted biographies of the man. Trouble is it’s not true. I made that one up, too. Ah, there’s the knock at the door. It’s the Wiki police. Farewell, my good readers, and if they allow me the use of a laptop and access to the net in chokey, I pledge to carry on writing this blog. If they don’t - love, peace and kisses to you all.

Ain’t no one can hate as well as the Left even when they have no idea what they’re hating. Bring back the Nazis – at least they knew how to march and could organise a real bonfire

Prominent on today’s Daily Mail (page 6, Wednesday, April 10) are a number of comments by various folk who would most certainly regard themselves as ‘on the left’ about the death of Mrs Thatcher. They are all notable for their utterly charmless viciousness. You can find the online version here, but I will reproduce a few examples:

JOEY BARTON: The footballer posted: ‘I'd say RIP Maggie but it wouldn't be true. If heaven exists that old witch won't be there.’ Barton is not known for being the sharpest blade in the box and apart from his football has become known for beating people up.

FRANKIE BOYLE: The comedian tweeted: ‘All that Thatcher achieved was to ensure that people living in Garbage Camps a hundred years from now will think that Hitler was a woman.’ Boyle has been criticised for making fun of a Down’s Syndrome child and other forms of disability.

MARK STEEL: The comedian wrote: 'What a terrible shame – that it wasn't 87 years earlier.' For sheer, brilliant wit I doubt that can be bettered.

ROSS NOBLE: The comedian tweeted: 'Bloody typical that Thatcher dies when I am in  Australia. I hate to miss a good street party.' Noble was four years old when Thatcher was first elected.

DEREK HATTON: The former Liverpool councillor said: 'The issue isn't about whether she is dead. I regret for the sake of millions of people that she was ever born. She promoted a form of greed in business that we've never known before and it's continued ever since. She actually changed the whole face of this country in a way, that you know, people wouldn't have even anticipated. Even her successors got away with murder, literally, for example Blair in Iraq, that they wouldn't have got away with had it not been for what she did. Hatton is now a property developer with interests in Cyprus.

I have never thought of myself as a ‘Thatcher supporter’ as in some ways I find such broadbrush descriptions (‘he admitted that he supported toothpaste’) to be almost meaningless. I have previously outlined why I think as Prime Minister the women undertook what were undoubtedly necessary reforms that, I suspect, would not have been undertaken by any other political leader of the time. Certainly you can disagree with her policies, but any discussion of them deserves to be intelligent, informed and rational. Likening the woman to Hitler as Boyle does is not intelligent, informed or rational.

 

Perhaps most disturbing is this from an Alex Callinicos, who (I read) is Professor of European Studies at King's College, London, and member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He says: ‘Murder was Thatcher's business. Sometimes the murder was metaphorical – of industries and communities. It still destroyed people's lives. Sometimes the murder was real. Thatcher over-saw the ongoing dirty war in Ireland.’

 

His comments invite, off the top of my head, these questions: what would he say about those who promoted the motor car in the early years of the 2oth century and murdered the livery stable and horse trading industries? What would he say about Apple, Microsoft and the rest of have murdered the typewriter and word processor manufacturing industries? How does he feel about the various Asian countries who modernised their economies and began producing steel and other consumer goods more efficiently and cheaper than Britain which led to the demise – OK, if you insist ‘murder’ if you insist – of Britain’s steel and white goods industries?

 

As for the ‘real murder’, what does the  professor have to say about the IRA bombings in Ireland and England, in  London, Manchester and Armagh, for example? Arguably the bomb attack in Brighton when Thatcher herself was the target – arguably – was ‘legitimate’, but blowing to pieces ordinary folk who were guilty of nothing else but walking past the spot where a bomb was detonated would seem just a tad infra-dig.

 

These outbursts, I think, have their roots in Britain’s chronic and bizarre ‘them and us’ mentality, which is not just a mere disagreement about how the country should be run but incorporates real, visceral hatred. And as someone who dislikes a great deal, not least hypocrisy, Mr Hatton, but can honestly say he ‘hates’ nothing, I find it incomprehensible.

 

Here are a few pictures of how some in Britain ‘celebrated’ Thatcher’s death.

 

 

 

Astute political judgment from four young women who were not yet born by the time Thatcher resigned. But to be young is very heaven. Things are always quite simple, rather like political judgment

 

 

More intelligent discourse here in the free world.

 

Look away now if you want just another chorus of what a bitch Maggie was. She wasn’t

 

It would be perverse to ignore what this morning is the big story here in Britain, but I am neither going to indulge in a round of universal praise nor a rant of unmitigated condemnation. If that’s the kind of thing you want, you’ll find whatever you want elsewhere in spades. In fact, the chances are you’ve already found it, and not doubt what you have read have confirmed your prejudices that Margaret Thatcher – ‘Maggie’, The Iron Lady’’ Mrs T’ – was – delete as applicable – a modern-day saint with miraculous powers the likes of whom we shall not see again for some time / a monumental bitch of a she-devil who murdered children for sport, Both sides are willing to produce ‘proof’ for their view. (Incidentally, it has long been apparent to me that when most folk ‘want proof’, they want nothing of the kind. They merely want someone more articulate than themselves and preferably better known to confirm their prejudices. In that spirit, you’ll find proof galore if you hunt the net just a little to find ‘proof’ that, for example, aliens DO exist, live up are arses and make a mean spag bol if that’s your personal delusion.)

So instead of a hallelujah chorus or a round of kill-the-bitch (rather difficult in Mrs T’s case as life has already got in there first) I should like to remind those of you who are ‘more mature’ i.e. an old fart like me (or inform those of you too young to remember) what was happening in Britain in the late Seventies and what state the country was in. On the radio this morning – which was unsurprisingly wall-to-wall Maggie except for the football and weather forecast – Max Hasting, hack of this parish and once editor of the Daily Telegraph, made the point that ‘Thatcher was of her time. Any given leader can probably only do what they do at a given moment of history’, and I think it is a good point. Take a look at the picture above and reflect on what someone else observed on the radio this morning, that ‘Britain was economically and politically a laughing stock’ in Europe. It was taken in London's Leicester Square at a time when our rubbish collectors went on strike. Why I can't remember - perhaps they wanted more sugar in their tea like the bosses. But what you see above could be seen all over the country. It was not a pretty sight.

The Seventies were for the more developed nations of Western Europe the endgame for an economic model. I specify ‘for the more developed nations’ because countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece were still emerging from dictatorships, in the case of Spain and Portugal, several decades of it, and were still economically several decades behind Britain, France and German. The Japanese were beginning to produce better, more well-equipped cars than Europe and selling them more cheaply (it was the Japanese who began to sell cars with a radio as standard and European and US car makers had reluctantly to follow suit). Coal and steel were being produced and sold more cheaply and white goods were also cheaper to import. By the Seventies the quality of many British goods, almost always those at the bottom end of the market, were of piss-poor quality. The country was also in the grip of rampant inflation.

Faced with these problems, the various governments of the Seventies all opted for the easy way out: paying subsidies. It is the coward’s way out – pay off the blackmailer, which only encourages him to come back for more. It is, of course, far too easy for a blogger writing after the event to criticise: what would we have done given that the collapse of Britain’s heavy industries – coal, steel and car making – would, if not managed properly – have led to massive unemployment. And I really can’t blame the trades unions for some of the things they did: their role was, is and always will be to represent the interests of their members and their members wanted to keep working. Why should they pay the price while ‘the toffs’, who were everyone else but them as far as many were concerned, were able to carry on blithely? Where the unions came unstuck, I think, as that too many of there leaders were rooted in the old ‘let’s create a socialist state’ ideal ‘by taking over the means of production’, and striking and other forms of industrial unrest were their weapons. It was never going to end in sweetness and light and it didn’t, but that is no criticism of Thatcher.

So you might agree or disagree with what she did, but any honest man and woman would be hard put to deny that she was a one-off: she didn’t care whether or not she was popular – which makes her almost unique among politicians – and she was convinced she knew how best to pull the country out of the mess it was in. She went for it and transformed the country. There is much I dislike about the country into which she transformed Britain, not least the way almost everyone seemed to jump on the ‘greed is good’ mantra. But I sincerely believe she was far more nuanced than her public image would suggest. Nor do I believe she was the right-wing harridan of left-wing mythology. So as far I as I am concerned: RIP Margaret Thatcher.

When is printing money not printing money? Never, actually, but there’s bugger all you and I can do about it except choose to believe the bullshit

It’s always good to begin obliquely, so I shall begin this entry with a medical story. One night several years ago, about five years ago, I got up to have a pee. The next thing I remember is coming to leaning against the bath with my wife leaning over me. I had passed out. What made it all just a little more alarming was that two years earlier while using the rowing machine in the gym at work I had a heart attack.
My wife called an ambulance and I was taken to Derriford Hospital in Plymoth 40 miles away. The doctor who examined me had blood tests done, monitored my blood pressure and did various other tests, but could find nothing wrong with me. And my heart was in good condition. What had occurred had nothing to do with my heart. But she was loth to let me go. At about 8am the following morning a colleague turned up and she asked him for his opinion. She explained what had happened - that I had got up during the night to have a pee and had passed out - but that all the tests she had had done revealed that nothing was amiss. He told her what had happened, she told me, and within 30 minutes I was up and dressed and allowed to make my way home.
What had happened? Well, it was something which, the colleague told her, happens quite regularly, but almost always only to men. I had suffered ‘micturition syncope’. Sounds bad, doesn’t it, but actually it is not that bad at all. Translated into the kind of language you and I use and understand, it means ‘fainting while having a pee’.

This is rather a good example of medical men and women using ten words where two would do and possibly only trying to disguise the fact that they don’t really have a clue as to what is going on. Another example is NSU, and infection with which those of you who have ever had to visit ‘Ward 45’ or whatever they call it in your neck of the woods will be familiar. NSU means nothing more than ‘non-specific urethritis’, and that means an a general infection which inflames the urethra and isn’t gonorrhoea (and I don’t mean on of Lear’s daughters).

I’m not suggesting our doctors are rogues, but like most profession they are apt to resort to jargon not just for convenience but partly because it shuts the rest of us out. There are however, rather more dubious reasons to resort to jargon. For example, it was quite some time before I realised that when a company is ‘highly leveraged’ it means it has borrowed a lot of money. But saying Global Undertakings Inc/plc/Ltd is ‘highly leveraged doesn’t sound half as bad as ‘deep in debt’. And, finally to get to the point ‘pursuing a policy of quantitative easing in order to stimulate the economy’ sounds reasonably respectable, admirable even. But were we to be told that our Treasury, the U.S. Fed and, most recently, Japan’s Central

©Paul Zanetti
Bank is ‘printing money’, I don’t think any of us would be half as sanguine. But that is exactly what they are doing.

Mind, it’s all in a good cause - isn’t it? The idea is to ‘stimulate spending’. Again, who would argue with that. Well, savers for one thing, because the rates they are offered when they want to put a bit of money by for their old age are more or less non-existent. As usual, when you ask an ‘expert’ - I do so love ‘experts’, wish I were an ‘expert’ - whether the ‘policy of quantitative easing’ is worth a row of beans the answer you will get will depend solely on which expert you ask. Broadly, the are split down the middle: supporters say, yes, it has helped and the economy is now in better shape than had we not ‘pursued a policy of quantitative easing’.

The others, those who think it is totally daft totally daft to print money, for whatever reason, will tell you the opposite: that it is sheer madness to print money, whatever the reason. So asking for an ‘expert opinion’ gets you absolutely nowhere. I mean you have to know something about the subject in order to choose the right expert, one who might actually know what he or she is talking about, and if you knew something about the subject, you wouldn’t be seeking an ‘expert opinion’ in the first place. Q.E.D.

I must admit that I am aware of taking too simplistic view on this matter, and have been knocking around to find some explanation for quantitative easing which doesn’t involve printing money. To be fair, the various central banks are not actually printing money at all, but they might as well be: they are simply crediting themselves with money out of thin air and using that money to buy up government bonds. But it would be difficult to fool a five-year-old as to what is going on: it is exactly as though they were printing money.

Does it matter? Supporters insist that the economies of developed nations would be even more in the shit had quantitative easing not been adopted, but in truth there is no way we can test that claim. I simply take the view that I am in no position to make a blind bit of difference and never will be, so I might as well take it on the chin. But I do get just a little peeved that at the end of the day it will be the usual people who will carry the can - those at the bottom of the pile. At my age I might not see too much misery, but I do increasingly wonder what the future will hold for my daughter, 17 in August, and my son, 14 in May.

When I was in my 20s, the big problem the country faced was ‘beating inflation’. You went to the shops, bought a pint of milk, went home and by the time you opened carton, it had already gone up in price. Mrs Thatcher - the Saviour of the

Hans Jederman gets ready to go out for a pint of milk
Western World/A She-Devil Incarnate depending upon which prejudiced bastard you are talking to - dealt with inflation, but did it the Hayek way: she let firms fail and a great many people lost their jobs. For that, at the end of the day, is the only real solution.

Trouble is, of course, that if you are one of those paying the price, it’s not a solution you’re going to vote for. Hayek’s old sparring partner Keynes was all for spending our way out of trouble. Yet that means simply more borrowing, which again doesn’t these days seem to be the wisest thing to do. But never mind, the best brains in the land are on the case and have come up with a solution: print more money! But doesn’t that mean stoking inflations? Well, yes sir, it does, and it will be the salvation of the western world. At this point I think it is time to go an lie down. Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for being a simple fellow with a simplistic view of the world and her acorns.

Mother Russia? Still misunderstood? Perhaps, but ain’t nothing like doing things as they were always done

I grew up in what was then called the Cold War and everything was simple: we, the West – that was the U.S. Great Britain, France and the rest – were the Good Guys, and the East – the USSR and its various satellite states, as well as those who aligned themselves to it in return for financial support – were the Bad Guys. Looking back, it is all very reminiscent of the ‘cowboy films’ at the time: the Good Guys road white horses, wore the trousers over their boots and worse cool hats, and the Bad Guys road black horses, tucked their trousers into their boots and wore rather sillier hats. And just like the morality conveyed in those cowboy films – Rin Tin Tin, Gene Autry, Annie Oakley, Roy Rogers, The Cisco Kid et al – the Cold War – well, ‘narrative’ is the buzz word at present (and although I don’t want to use it because I don’t like using buzz words, I can’t deny that it has become a very useful word) – was equally as facile. What we did was Good because we were the Good Guys: QED. And what they did was Bad because they were the Bad Guys: again QED. But, oh were life really that simple, as I have since discovered.

This is not the place to retail the various iniquities of which the West is guilty, but a short list of them over the years would include invading Iraq twice (‘because it was there’ as we Brits like to justify many of our escapades) and destabilising countries because it suited our interests (for example, getting rid of the elected government of the Iran and installing the Shah to make sure we could keep our hands on Persian oil). But before the East gets all hoity-toity and self-righteously smug, their list of misdemeanours is equally as unimpressive (invading Hungary and the then Czechoslovakia, and also toppling governments, that kind of thing). Both sides were also not above murder and assassination, although the West insists it never indulged in that kind of thing (which makes taking out that nice Mr Bin Laden rather difficult to explain).

So far, so banal, and what is the chap on about? Well, this morning my brother alerted me to the fact that the Voice of Russia is now available online. It also has a website which you can find here. The Voice of Russia is Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. Voice of America and, quite possibly, our very own BBC World Service (although the Beeb  – ‘Auntie’ to those who really can’t stand the Corporation – vehemently denies any such thing and insists that the World Service is solely there for the betterment of our coloured cousins with the sole objective of saving their souls. Nothing like the – allegedly CIA-funded Voice of America at all, old chap, and if you are inclined to believe such a thing, well, it’s a pretty poor show, if one might be so blunt! I mean what harm can there be in passing on to all and sundry the latest Test cricket scores?) The thought occurred to me, as it increasingly does these days which is admirably summed up by the French phrase ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. It’s like going back in time.

. . .

I have no idea how Boris Berezovsky’s life ended, but from what I have read the most likely explanation is that he hanged himself. But there is also the poisoning by radiation (worthy of a modenr-day Agatha Christie, that one) of one of his associates, the former KGB man Alexander Litvinenko, which we Brits are blaming on his former employers, the continuing crackdown on anyone who thinks Vladimir Putin is a bad egg and dares say so in public, and a general sense that Russia is reverting to type. How, for example, to explain its support of Syria’s Assad and apparent opposition to the West’s promotion of the ‘rebels’ ?

Actually, that’s a very bad example, but I did introduce it for that very reason. The current Janet and John thinking here in the West is pretty much along the lines of our Cold War analysis and equally as duplicitous. Assad was and is (he’s still alive and kicking) a nasty piece of work. And who can blame his brave people from rising up and attmpting to overthrow him ? First off, the ‘opposition’ in Syria is about as united as a family of Irish topers at a late-night drinking session. None of us really knows who is on whose side, and even if we knew that we still would not know why. But we do know that, for its own reasons, Iran supports Assad and supplying him with men and materiel, and that Saudi Arabia is supporting the ‘opposition’ and is dong the same for them. So what at first blush would seem like a war of liberation in Syria looks rather more like a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia for dominance in the area. The same thing is going on in Iraq whose Sunnis and Shi’ites will not get a single night’s peace until Iran and Saudi Arabia call it a day.

The West, which just loves to cover its intriguing with the fig leaf of ‘bringing democracy to the world’ is also supporting the Syrian ‘opposition’ and so, as though by default, Russia has taken up Assad. It also helps that with Assad in charge, Russia would have far more useful access to the Mediterranean (which is also why they want to keep Cyprus in their ambit). So it would seem it is also something of a proxy confrontation – I’ll use that word rather than ‘war’ – between the West and Russia. As I said, ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’.

. . .

I would dearly like to visit Russia, and meet its people. I would dearly like to spend more than a tourist week there. I should like to live among them, learn their language and get to know how they tick. As it happens I would also like to do the same with many other nations, not least with our Yankee cousins. My point is that so much of our ‘knowledge’ of countries and their people is nothing of the kind. I can read the Economist and the ‘serious’ newspapers as much as I like. I can listen to From Our Own Correspondent till the cows come home, but nothing would beat going there and making up my own mind.

I’m intrigued by Russia. I intrigued that – apparently – a great many of its people are really not that bothered about whether or not their system is ‘democratic’. As long as things wend their way, as long as they have work and can keep warm, can socialise with as much vodka as is necessary and as long as official life keeps out of their hair, the system is fine by them. Is that true ? I really don’t know and don’t have any way of knowing, but it would be interesting to meet ordinary Russians for myself and find out for myself. There were the days, of course, under the Soviet regime when people such as me were regarded as potential ‘useful idiots’ who could be invited over, wined and dined, shown the sites, perhaps if that was our bag, be introduced to a very pretty Russian woman or two, then returned to our country of origin to spread that word that things aren’t all that bad, if only we could get to understand each other. (The small ads of the New Statesman used to carry adverts for two-week coach trips to Poland which were ridiculously cheap, and I was sometimes tempted to go merely because they cost so little, but was put off buy the thought of spending almost 24 hours stuck in an uncomfortablte seat next to some comrade eulogising about ‘all them corn fields and ballet in the evening’)

I don’t doubt that ordinary Russians have just as skew-whiff a picture of Britain and its people as we do of Russia and her people. Judging from today’s Voice of Russia web front page things aren’t looking too good in Britain at all. Funny that. Especially when we play the same game.

Finally, this is another chance for me to plug one of my You Tube videos. Oddly enough, it is rather pertinent.

Introducing to those who’ve never heard of him one Johnny Winter (before he pops his clogs - he’s not that young anymore). I’m also rather intrigued as to what wars North Korea has been fighting to allow its generals to award themselves so many medals. After that just a few bits and pieces of the usual shite

Here’s a song I’m sure many of you know, but might well be unfamiliar with this version. Give it a listen. As far as I’m concerned he does the song justice, where others might well have reduced it to Saturday night chicken ’n chips cabaret. It’s by Johnny Winter.



On Sunday, April 14, my mate Pete and I are going to see Johnny Winter play at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in West London. I’ve always like Mr Winter’s music since, in 1972 in my last year at college in Dundee, I turned on the radio and heard the track Funky Music and thought ‘shit, that’s music I like’. Below you can hear two tracks.

I bought several of his albums - that is LPs - almost as soon as I got heard it. The one I bought which has that track was  there was Johnny Winter And which featured Rick Derringer - no convenient Amazon website then and I had to got to a ‘record store’ to order it but, as these things happen, they all got lost. Since then I’ve since acquired several of the ones I owen on CD.

Bach enthusiast, Mozart enthusiast, Palestrina enthusiast, Haydn enthusiast, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Ravel, Beethoven, Dave Fiucyzinski, Freddie Jackson, Bob Dylan blah-di-blah enthusiast that I am (how many more composers and artists can I name without blowing it all and merely coming across as a show-off, name-dropping cunt rather than a man with admirably eclectic tastes?), I have a soft spot for Mr Winter. He’s not subtle and Radio 3 won’t give him a lot of airtime between now and Kingdom Come, but the man has something, and I must admit I’m looking forward to gig. (And this is as much a nod to Pete that I still owe him for the ticket and I shan’t forget, as I’m not that sort of guy.

Mr Winter is one of that very rare breed, an albino rock star. There are, as far as I know only two of them and the other is his slightly better known brother Edgar. (Albinos are, if you don’t know, men, women and other animals who have some kind of genetic ‘defect’ - I have to put it in inverted commas in case we now should call it a ‘lifestyle choice’ and it’s illegal to call it a defect and I don’t really fancy appearing befoe Bow Street magistrates charged with a hate crime - which means their hair and skin are completely white. Good news, of course, for any Ku Klax Klanners and British National Party supporters who still froth at the mouth at the very mention of reggae and that kind of thing.) Here’s a second song by the man.



. . .

Well, that’s a shortish entry so I should, according to the Bloggers’ Code as set down in the Marseille Memorandum of 2008, add a little more to make worthwhile the space I am taking up on the web. I mean who knows what gems I am displacing by my neurotic insistence on making a noise and taking shite at length? A quick flick through the various media websites reveals that North Korea are at it again and now claim they are at war with South Korea and the U.S. Quite what they are up to I don’t know and don’t even claim to know. Perhaps young Jim Jam Kim or whatever the young shaver’s name is who inherited the throne from his dad was given an Samsung Galaxy III which isn’t working quite as he would like. And incidentally, take a look at the picture below which has appeared almost

everywhere. Who are they kidding? Are we really expected to believe that the assorted generals surrounding the young shaver really are taking their orders from him? I know it’s a bit below the belt, but he looks to me as though he still needs written instructions on where to find his cock. But what the real power set-up in North Korea is would be anyone’s guess. And where the hell did they get all those medals? As far as I know the last war North Korea was involved in was the Fifties’ Korean War, so what have they done to earn that bunch each and every one of them is wearing? Answers, please, on a postcard addressed to the usual dustbin.

. . .

The really big news here in Old Blighty is the utterly bizarre weather we’ve been having. Summertime - that’s ‘summertime’ as in the clocks go forward - begins early tomorrow morning, but most of the country is apparently snowbound. I say apparently, because we lucky ones down here in Cornwall are only getting the rather cold weather. Freezing temperatures, blizzards (or what passes for a blizzard here in Britain - our descriptions usually have the Swedes, Alaskans, Norwegians and the good folk from Siberia in stitches for them -12c is a welcome relief) are taking place further up North.

I rather suspect we are in for a belter of a summer - ‘highest overnight temperatures since time began’, that kind of thing (‘Most dramatic headline since Caxton cribbed a printing press from Gutenberg!’) Or not. See that’s the beauty of Britain: like our national football (U.S ‘soccer’ - nambies), rugby and cricket sides almost everything about Britain is unpredictable. Our national sportsmen, for example, will play a real blinder one minute, then redefine what it is to be a pratt the next by losing (as our Test team almost did in New Zealand - bloody New Zealand. The only reason we held them to a draw was because their best players had to go home to help with the shearing. Talk of luck!)

Anyway, back to the weather. It has been awful, shivery cold down here and shivery cold and very snowy further north. The weathermen say it could even carry on till the end of April. Give me a break!

. . .

Finally the bits you have been wating for:

Arch WAG Abby Clancy put on a beige dress and has gone off on holiday!

Model Care Delevingne (I’ve never heard of her either, but then I am 103 years old - make allowances, please) has been showing off her toned torso.

Katie Price (who was once the King of Jordan or something, but we’re not supposed to mention that any more - apparently she’s taken out a super injunction) has got married again. Yes, got married again. I’ll repeat that in case anyone reading this still can’t quite believe it: Katie Jordan has married again. That’s right, again.

Meryl Streep’s daughter has split from her boyfriend. Isn’t life sad? And there was me thinking she might have starved to death in the Ethiopian desert. Funny how you can get these things sooo wrong.

Jessica Alba has supper with her hubby.

Kim Sears looks summery in a white dress and floral cardigan. Anyone care to tell me who Kim Sears is? Is she anything to do the nutter who inherited North Korea from his dad. No? Well, she could have been, couldn’t she, I mean the names are reasonably similar. Do your reckon Jim Jam Kim wears summery dresses? Not in public, probably.

Sorry to say this but: beware conspiracy theorists (or at least intemperate bloggers). And a spot of Britain’s national sport: Teasing The French. I’m sure our Gallic cousins have a useful word for ‘teasing’ which I could employ here just to show off, but, sadly, I don’t know it

All the following notwithstanding, I can’t resist posting a picture which has come my way of the latest euro bank note being issued in Cyprus. Here it is:

A year or two ago, I came across a blog by a former advertising executive call John Ward which he calls The Slog. The name is some kind of derivation from ‘deconstructing bollocks’, and his avowed intention was to try to cut through the - well, bollocks - in which much of our ‘news’ is swaddled by governments, official bodies and, sadly all too often, our media (who, unsurprisingly are more interested in keeping the dollars rolling in than anything else) to try to uncover what’s beneath it all. I found the blog at the previous height of the euro crisis when it looked increasingly likely that Greece would have to leave, causing all kinds of upset.

John Ward refers to his sources, many apparently in influential positions with whom, by his own account, he is in constant touch, and although I have no way of knowing whether or not they are quite as well-informed as he claims, I must, for any lack of evidence to the contrary, take him by his word. That was in the late autumn of 2010, and as that year turned into 2011, John Ward predicted with almost absolute certainty that it was a done and dusted matter that over the weekend in March 2011, Greece would leave the euro. I think I even blogged on it myself.

The plan, he said, had been hatched in Germany and Washington, which, he claimed, was following its own agenda of weakening Europe as a financial market, and the so-called ‘Grexit’ would be underway once the financial markets closed on a Friday. By the Monday Greece was still a member. John Ward gave chapter and verse as to what had happened and claimed that he hadn’t, in fact, been wrong, but there had been several developments which meant the plan to turf Greece out had been put on hold. That was two years ago. I carried on reading The Slog, but in view of that one failed prediction, I did so rather less.

I was also increasingly unimpressed by some of the language and phrases John Ward used. It wasn’t that I was offended, it was that they seemed curiously inappropriate for what would otherwise seem to be a serious commentary. And he, too, seemed and seems to subscribe to the, in my view completely batty, suspicion that the whole euro crisis is nothing less than a German plot to dominate Europe. I mean would you accept as serious your GP’s health advice if he also claimed regularly to talk with elves and goblins? No, nor would I. John Ward habitually refers to ‘Berlin-am-Brussels’, calls Angela Merkel the Füherine and often makes reference to the Fourth Reich.

Looney tunes? I am apt to agree. And though, on the other hand, he does a lot of spadework, digging into this report and that, I rather think it is the kind of spadework which might be undertaken by those intent on ‘proving’ the Moon is not only made of cheese, but it is, in fact, a rare cheese produced only in the Cynon Valley, in South Wales. His latest suggestion is that the governments in the eurozone are planning some huge theft of everyone’s money. Oddly enough, given the government of Cyprus’s plan to grab a percentage of all savings in the island’s banks - a plan swiftly abandoned in the face of savers’ anger - John Ward’s suggestion might not seem quite as batty. But batty it is. I have never been a conspiracy theorist and am always inclined to cock-up theories, so that is where Mr Ward and I must part company.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I think the whole euro experiment is doomed to failure sooner rather than later and that a bad situation is being made far worse by the day by ill-thought-out ‘solutions’ and remedies. It would be pointless to mention exactly where the euro started going wrong, but I shall do so anyway: monetary union must come after political union not before it, because there simply has to be a credible body governing how it is operated. So from the outset the euro was (in my view - my sister, whose opinion I always respect, disagrees) doomed.

Everything else, for example, reports that Chirac insisted as a favour to the Greeks that Greece should be allowed in as a quid pro quo for supporting German reunification, was a sideshow. Even that fact that a great many countries fiddled their figures to become members is, in essence, not important. Things have gone from bad to worse - horrible unemployment and related miseries in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - because whatever measures suggested by the ECB and the rest were too timid, politically unacceptable or could simply not be agreed upon.

So we now have the mess we are in, including the utterly bizarre situation where European taxpayers might well have found themselves in the position of protecting the savings of Russians, much of which is widely believed to be criminal money.

I think the problem stems largely from the kind of people running the various European institutions. I think the essence of the matter is that those who staff the ECB and the EC etc are more or less my generation and a little younger, men and women – though, I should imagine largely men – who grew up in the heady days of student politics and idealism in the late 60s, early 70s and in a way simply haven’t outgrown that idealism. They seem to suffer from a panglossian conviction that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ however rocky the road to that world might at present be. (Here in Britain we have a similar problem in that all too many of our politicians in all parties started out as special advisers to other politicians and have limited experience of the world you and I know).

So underlying almost all the measures taken is that they must keep an eye on ‘the bigger picture’ – yes, things might be tough now and, yes, people might have to make sacrifices now, but think of what it is all leading to, the glory of it all.

After all, aren’t we continually told the one aim of the original ‘EU’ when it was first set up as the Coal and Steel Community was to tie France and Germany so closely together that they would never again go to war? And all too often the, in my view facile, claim is made that ‘the EU has kept peace in Europe for the past 60 years’. It is this immature idealism which is blinding the decision makers to the effects their decisions are having. I mean no one in their right mind would otherwise countenance tolerating youth unemployment at more than 50pc (as it is in Greece, Spain and Portugal).

To adapt that hoary saying ‘they can’t see the trees for the wood’. So although these men and women are by no means ‘stupid’, I suggest this mess is largely, almost wholly, the result of infinite bumbling, though for the reasons I suggest above.

. . .

There are few things we Brits like better than teasing the French, and Lord are they teasable. So in that spirit I’d like ‘to share’ (as they say on TV) these three anecdotes with you that are perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not, but which are quite amusing for those of use who aren’t French:

John Kennedy’a Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 1960s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk responded: ‘Does that include those who are buried here?’

There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room and announced: ‘Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?’ A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: ‘Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day; they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day; and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?’

A Royal Navy admiral was attending a naval conference that included admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Australian and French navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks when a French admiral suddenly complained that whereas Europeans learn many languages, the English learn only English. He then asked: ‘Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?’ Without hesitating, the British admiral replied: ‘Maybe it’s because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, South Africans and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.’

NB Does anyone use semi-colons when they speak? I’ve often wondered. And as I’ve just lambasted John ‘The Slog’ Ward for what I regard as unnecessary national stereotyping, it would be thoroughly remiss of me not to engage in some quite gratuitous hypocrisy. So in that spirit I give you: Jacques!

How not to do it: the EU shows us how. And I repeat my heartfelt plea: lay off the Germans, it’s not their fault. Britain’s one and only Ronnie Biggs waves farewell, and why global warming really frightens me

If someone somewhere has written a textbook on how make damn sure a bad situation becomes a lot worse and could well end in disaster sooner rather than later, the good folk trying to end the euro crisis have gone through it with a toothcomb and applied every principle therein they could find. They haven’t actually announced ‘the euro’s fucked, save what you can, each man and women for themselves’, but they might well have done.

We have been through Ireland and Greece almost going to the wall and then somehow hanging on – cuts in public services and misery for all those at the bottom of the pile notwithstanding - and then came Spain, which didn’t actually need a bailout, but which came pretty damn close and is most certainly not out of the woods yet. Each time the day was saved with the liberal application of sticking plaster, financial legerdemain and, I should imagine, outright lies, as the group which is referred to as the Troika kept the wolf from the door and the euro is as yet still alive, although not exactly kicking. In economic terms, Ireland and Greece are relatively speaking tiddlers.

The bigger worry was that the situation in Spain would get out of hand, followed by Italy. Both countries have sizeable economies and trying to contain a collapse in both could well have proved nigh-on impossible. But all has been quiet on the euro front for several months, the abysmal unemployment figures in Spain, Greece and Portugal – apparently every second man and woman under 25 is unemployed - notwithstanding. Then came the complete and utterly incomprehensible cock-up in Cyprus. In euro terms Cyprus in not just a tiddler, it hardly exists at all. But its government is on the verge of bankruptcy and needs a euro bailout to the tune of €17 billion.

This is where the brains in Brussels seem to have lost the plot entirely. Cyprus is well-known as a tourist destination, but its economy, in fact, is sustained by it being something of a banking haven. I read today that around €65 billion are stashed away in saving accounts with various Cypriot banks. (What makes the matter even more ticklish, although this has not direct bearing on the problem, is that a substantial part of that €65 billion is Russian mafia money.)

Given all that money tucked away in savings account the Troika suggested to the Cypriot government that it might care to steal some of it, around €6 billion or so, and put that towards the sum it needs ensure the PM and his various ministers continue to have a sensible supply of ouzo and mezes (err, I might be mixing my cultures there, but you get the point). Another factor is that German politicians - quite rightly – are slowly waking up to the fact that not all Germans – that’s not all Germans by a long chalk – are at all keen any more in ensuring the euro survives until kingdom come if it means they have to dip their hands into their pockets every other day. So the word went out to those with money stashed away in Cypriot banks: sorry, chaps, but we’re skimming off 10 per cent of what you have there. There was, as you can imagine, uproar, especially as there is a EU-wide law protecting the first €100,000 of any savings from such a measure.

Then there was the angle that depositors can broadly be split into those with just a little tucked away for a rainy day and various thickset Russian crims who all live in undersead Mediterranen lairs with speedboats and mini-subs when they are not patrolling the streets of

Moscow at night shooting each other. Or something along those lines. Given the rather large amounts of money they are laundering, a 10 per cent haul would be quite a sizeable amount. On the other hand these are chaps who know what to do with a gun and a knuckleduster rather more than you and I, so it does seem extraordinarily silly to suggest ripping off the rip-off merchants.

The most recent response has been that a vote on the measure in the Cypriot parliament saw the idea well and truly kicked out and everything is back to square one. But that means the government is still heading for bankruptcy if it can’t get hold of the necessary readies. During all this Cyprus’s banks were not opened to avoid a run on the banks. They are due to open on Thursday morning, although there are suggestions they could well be kept shut until a deal has been struck whereby the government can get hold of the £17 billion it needs for that next round of drinks. That makes sense, of course, but it seems unlikely that it will be lent the money. And as soon as the banks open we can confidently expect that run on the bank to take place.

Certainly, there will be some short-term emergency measures that can be put in place to try to avoid the worst, such as restricting the amounts which can be withdrawn, but in the long run that would simply be pissing in the wind. But the greatest damage has been made by allowing savers in Italy and Spain to start fearing that they, too, could well see some of their savings - well, stolen isn’t too strong a word - to bail out their governments of those countries as and when. And it doesn’t matter that, perhaps, a bailout will never be needed. Slowly, but surely, savers will start withdrawing their moolah and stashing it somewhere safer, in Britain, for example, or Switzerland, or for that matter anywhere outside the Eurozone.

So there you have it: a bad situation has been made 100 times worse because some bright spark simply didn’t think it through.

. . .

Keen and regular readers of the ‘ere blog will know that my heritage is partly Teuton (one of the reasons that two of my nicknames at school were ‘Jackboots II’ and ‘Kraut II’ – ‘II’ because until my last year I had an older brother there who was known as – is there really any need to labour the point? – ‘Jackboots I’ and ‘Kraut I’. (Incidentally, another nickname was ‘Preggers’ because at 13 my body had not yet evolved into that handsome, Adonis-like exemplar it was to become, and although I was about 10/11 stone, I was, for several years, still only around 5ft 5in, so being something of a round thing, various unkind souls thought I looked pregnant.)

I have to add that by way of laying my cards on the table as I am about to make a heartfelt plea for my mother’s kinsmen and women. Why is it always the Krauts who get the stick in all matters euro fuck-up? From where I sit their only sin is a chronic lack of imagination and a rather stolid out lookout. In fact, the word stolid’ might well have been invented to describe some, though by no means all, Germans. The lack of imagination is well highlighted by the cards they produce: superbly engineered and the car of choice in any emergency but less exciting to look than the view of a suburban street on a rainy afternoon in Droitwich). But that is their only sin.

The great Simon Heffer and the great Dominic Sandbrook are, I’m bound to say, entirely wrong: there is no masterplan to dominate Europe, to finish the job the Kaiser and Hitler started. The Germans are, almost to a man and woman, more than happy for life to carry on in its comfortable and ever-so-slightly dull way, with plenty of socialising, plenty of good food, plenty of wine and beer and no hassles whatsoever. It was this attitude which, for a while at least, made them EU enthusiasts. British pub bores are simply quite wrong: the Germans are not a warlike nation forever on the lookout for more Lebensraum.

Their tragedy, if that’s not too strong a word, is geographical: their country sits slap bang in the middle of Europe. So when Napoleon – now there’s a man who was warlike, but you don’t hear the French being perpetually slagged off for being warlike – set his heart on sipping a glass of vodka in Moscow one day, they only way he could get there was through Germany. If an army wants to get from one end of Europe to another, it makes little sense to ‘by-pass’ Germany so as not to disturb them. But things are stirring in Germany: why, many are now asking themselves, should we always foot the bill? The explanation that they should ‘atone’ for their past is, by now almost 70 years after the end of World War II, looking more than a tad threadbare. It is that sentiment which is behind the proposed new party Alternative Fuer Deutschland.

It is their lack of imagination which for so long, for far too long, in fact, has kept them suggesting the same solution – austerity – to the euro crisis. Of course, it looks good on paper: if you’re going bust, stop spending so much. What they can’t grasp is that solution which is the obvious one in a domestic situation is not the obvious one on an international level, just as Newtonian physics seem to work on a certain macro level, but come apart completely at the atomic level which is where Einsteinian physics come in. And even those are now being shown to fall apart in other situations.

Yes, Germany is a prosperous country (and might I also at this point knock on the head another myth: the Germans are not hardworking or, at least, no more hardworking than other folk. They are simply better organised and like to get things done the right way the first time round). But there is equally as much private wealth in France, Italy, Spain and, yes, Greece. So, German taxpayers are asking, why us.

Why indeed? . . .

The only way this pic can possibly be captioned is: ‘The British Way’. Foreigners (which is all of you who were not lucky enough to be born British, or in my case half-British, half-German) will have no idea and can have no clue as to why this pic is so pleasing. And if you’re British and also have no clue - fuck off abroad. Let me add a caveat: Kiwis and Ozzies might well also be in the picture, perhaps even Canucks (sorry, but I can’t think of anything more insulting - if there is a term, please get in touch).

However, much I dislike British food, British attitudes, British ‘style’, the British obsession with ‘class’, the Brits attitude to sex, it is a pic like this which sums up the quintessence of being British which, almost, forgives all. Almost. For the record it is a pic of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs arriving at the funeral for fellow Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds. Quite why he decided to flick a V sign and at whom I don’t know, but neither do I much care. Ronnie has given us Brits a great deal of entertainment.

He returned to Britain from Brazil when his health gave way and was immediately jailed by the usual jobsworths know what’s best for Britain. He was later diagnosed with cancer and released on compassionate grounds by the usual jobsworths who have a slighter better idea of what’s good for Britain than their less imaginative cousins. By the look of things Ronnie is not long for this world. I for one wish him a kind life for however much of it he has left.

. . .

Here are one or two items from the news you might have missed yesterday in all the excitement of whether or not Cyprus goes tits up by the beginning of next week or a few days later:

Kelly Holmes goes home in a blue shift dressafter a night out. Well!

Christina Aguilera has lost weight!

Girls Aloud split! 

Khloe Kardashian towers over her sister Kourtney because she’s wearing sky-hight heels! Fancy! The minx!

Nicki Minaj suffers yet another wardrobe malfunction! (Her tits pop out of her swimsuit as she films a music video.) 

Una Healy told by critics to put on a bit of weight! (Which is a welcome variation on the usual theme of ‘Just look what a fat cow XXXXX has become! And that cellulite! Shocking!)

Jessie J shaves all her hair off! Tulisa has NOT gone up two dress sizes! 

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Steward haven’t split! Ellen DeGeneres has the flu! Emmy Rossum turns up at charity gala - and allows photographers to take her picture! Well!

Nicole Scherzinger carries her bulldog Roscoe out of her hotel as she goes off to dinner! 

Vogue covergirl Kate Upton slaps her bottom!

Taylor Swift might have new boyfriend!

Ellie Goulding wears striped bikini top and stonewashed hotpants!

Colin Farrell goes for a brisk war! 

But that’s enough crap. For more of it visit the Daily Mail’s column of shame here

. . .

  Bloody global warming really, really, really pisses me off!