Forget UKIP, many economists in Germany now want an alternative to the euro freaks, too

The big news here in Britain for about five minutes last week was that at a by-election in Hampshire, the anti-EU party UKIP came second, beating the Conservatives into third place. I doubt whether that will have made many headlines abroad, and even here in Britain interest waned almost overnight given that strange things tend to happen at by-elections and given the accepted view that on many issues UKIP is more in tune with rank and file Tories than are the Cameronian Tories. Cameron himself has vowed that UKIP’s success will not mean he will take a ‘lurch to the Right’, but at the same time the Mail on Sunday reported today that a future Tory government will ditch the Human Rights Act. (Actually - and this is a bit of insider info, nudge, nudge, wink, wink – the word is that the Mail on Sunday hack did get a Tory briefing but got something horribly, horribly wrong and wrote the wrong story. The trouble is that now it has reported a possible new policy, one that will go down a storm in the shires and among suburban blue-rinsers and their wives, Cameron will look a right tit if he doesn’t follow through.)

UKIP – the United Kingdom Independence Party – is, as far as I am concerned not a political party at all but a single-issue pressure group. And that single issue is: Britain must withdraw from the European Union. A UKIP supporter reading this blog might well bleat ‘but we are a political party’, but as a rule political parties sport policies on a range of issues, and when UKIP does present ‘its policies’ on education, transport, defence, the economy and all the other areas politicians are forever sticking their noses into, they remain wholly unconvincing. Just the one issue preoccupies their every waking moment and that is getting Britain out of the EU. On all other issues they are pretty much contingent with the Tory party.

Cameron once wrote off UKIP as ‘loonies and closet racists’ (and he could well have a point), but the problem was that as many rank and file blue-rinsers have rather a soft spot for UKIP (and I can think of several Tory acquaintances in rural Cornwall who have told me they ‘would vote UKIP if they had any chance of taking the seat), he ran dangerously close to describing many Tory supporters as ‘loonies and closet racists’ (and, again to be honest, if he were to do so, could still well have a point.) But UKIP aren’t just a problem for the right-of-centre; there are plenty of voters who identify with Labour (and even the Lib Dems) who are equally disenchanted with the European Union and might well in extremis find themselves voting for UKIP, especially if it means that the more successful UKIP is in an election for any given seat, the less successful the Tory candidate will be, so the better the outlook will be for the Labour chap or chappesse. And that, of course, is the big Tory worry: UKIP might not garner enough votes at the 2015 general election to win any seats, but it could garner enough to do the Tories a hell of a lot of damage and lose it seats.

The one pertinent point about UKIP – yes, there is one, you know – is that, for all their fogeyism and cravats and golf club jokes and gin and tonics, they are more in touch with the mood of Britain than many like to admit. But a more interesting point is that their disillusionment with the EU is not just a parochial British affair. So a drum roll please for ‘Alternative für Deutschland’, a soon-to-be-established party in Germany whose would-be founders and supporters are terminally fucked off with the whole euro crisis, Merkel’s measures to solve it and cross-party support in the Bundestag for those measures. The at the moment the party is scheduled to be formally founded in April at a meeting in Berlin and has promised to try to contest seats in Germany’s general election this September, or, if it isn’t ready to, to take part in the EU elections in 2014. You can read about the new party here, here, here and here (if you read German) and I must admit that that is where I have garnered my scant knowledge of it so far. But a crucial point is that, as far as I can see, they should not be regarded as a version of UKIP in Lederhosen and a Stein of lager.

First of all, they are specifically concerned with the euro crisis and are not demanding Germany’s withdrawal from the EU. Second, unlike the profile of your average UKIP bod, who to my mind is more at home swapping ever-so-smutty jokes at the golf club bar than taking part in a truly academic discussion, a quite a few of the bods who plan to set up Alternative für Deutschland are university economists who, however much you might disagree with their analyses, can at least be accepted as knowing what they are talking about. And quite apart from not being ‘anti-EU’, many are wholehearted supporters of the EU. It’s just the way the euro crisis is being handled which bothers them and, more importantly, what they see as implications for German democracy, and, yes, I admit Germans can get rather intense and dramatic in some matters, but I do think they have a point. They point out that although the parties in the Bundestag might disagree on strategy and tactics, all are agreed that the euro must be protected. It is the solid consensus on the matter which troubles them, and those Germans, of which there is a growing number, who no longer agree, are simply unrepresented.

So perhaps their fears for the future of democracy in Germany is not quite as daft. This could get interesting, especially as the election last week in Italy ensured that parliamentary chaos there for the foreseeable future is certain.

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Bloody rain!

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I gave you a house in Southampton which looked like Adolf Hitler, now here's a church in Tampa Bay, Florida, which looks like a chicken (or at least to those who take an interest in these things).

Why sound is just a little more important than you might think in film

After doing the comparative bit with Leon Russell’s Song For You, I thought I might do something similar but for a different reason.

When we watch a film, whether a horror, film, a romance, a thriller, a mystery, a comedy or a drama few of us realise quite how much we are being manipulated by the soundtrack. Think of the violins in the shower scene in Psycho when Janet Leigh is taken of the payroll rather earlier than any of us had a right to expect. The soundtrack acts as a signpost: this is where you will be thrilled/amused/turned into a romantic pink pussycat/disgusted.

Below are two short films I once uploaded to YouTube. They are, in fact, the same video, but with and utterly different musical soundtrack. The second here was, in fact, the first to be uploaded. Then I decided to produce a second version - the first one below - with an utterly different piece of music. And as far as I am concerned even though the ‘film’ is the same, they are to utterly different pieces. Play them and see what you think. I suggest you play them in


order. I can’t for the life of me remember who the first piece of music is by, it’s just something I found knocking about my iTunes collection. But the second, rather lovely piece, is by an Uzbeki singer and songwriter Sevara Nazarkhan (pic above) whose music I came across by chance somewhere (on Radio 3’s Late Junction, I think). The piece is called Gazli, and I don’t know what it means, either.

Here’s the first upbeat version:

And here’s the second downbeat version.

The children are my two, Elsie and Wesley. The pictures are now about seven or eight years old.

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I keep and eye on ‘the stats’ of this blog (should that be the ‘stats’ or ‘the’ stats? I don’t know. Suggestions please and all silly ones will be acted upon) and I am astounded to discover that one particular entry (this one) has been viewed more than twice as much as the next most popular entry — 4,031 times. At the time of writing this — March 2, 2013, at 10.06am, this blog as been views 38,128 times, so more than 10 per cent of those viewings are of that one entry. Why? Well, when I delve deeper into ‘the stats’ and look at ‘referring sites’, a great many of them are visited by people tracking down a well-known picture (left) of Mandy Rice-Davies (‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he’). So it has occurred to me to include that picture (and this preamble explaining what I’m doing) in every blog entry in an attempt to drum up visitors and encourage them to take a look at some other entries. It helps that when the picture was taken, she was a rather attractive woman.

Fingers are being crossed in Paris and Berlin that The Buffoon is not back - some hope given a decent but dull opponent. In Spain Rajoy promises to chop off his own hand, while in Athens the Greeks learn to swim

Well, all good thing must come to an end, and Italy’s recent resurgence in the credibility stakes could well breath its last in two days. Those who take an interest in these matters, and quite possibility even some of those who don’t, will remember that with Italy’s national debt growing ever bigger and the interest rates it had to offer in order to get people to lend it money growing ever larger the, the country – and the euro – was dragged back from the brink of disaster when its prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was persuaded to do the decent thing, take a pistol into the woods and resign.

In his place was appointed one Mario Monti, a highly respected economist, who set up an government of technocrats and helped Italy regain the confidence of the markets. But most importantly, unlike Berlusconi he was not regarded by the rest of the world as a complete buffoon. And in world politics these things do matter. Monti did the biz, much to the relief of assorted eurocrats for whom ‘the project’ and its success is not a matter of principle or ideals, rather a matter of not looking like a complete dick in the eyes of those who wish them ill at the best of times. And the euro is, in many ways, a symbol of the EU: if it crashes - in my view when it crashes - it will make the EU look so silly that the whole shooting match will go tits up (if I might, on this occasion, be allowed to mix ten to 15 metaphors).

On February 25 Italy goes to the polls in its 2,345th general election since the end of World War II. The left in Italy is led by a chap called Pier Luigi Bersani (a former Communist, but then most of those on the left usually are) who is well-respected generally thought to have the charisma of a packet of cornflakes. He is said to be staid and uninspiring, and that makes him no match for Berlusconi, however much of a buffoon our Silvio is.

Incidentally, there is still a great vagueness about how our man Silvio set up is business empire, which embraces the media, the food industry and a football team, and made his billions (the Daily Mail delights in his Blofeld-type lair on the coast of Sardinia). The Economist, which has never liked him, has hinted that he was first set up by the Mafia as a useful means to get

their money laundered. I can’t remember what evidence they produced for that claim, but I have to admit that it is a claim I subscribe to completely, solid evidence or not. It is the sheer vagueness of his start in business which is so worrying.

When Monti resigned and the election was called, the left had a very healthy lead in the polls of around 15 per cent. Then Berlusconi went out on the stump, got the crowds laughing (where Bersani has the crowds yawning) and that lead has already been cut to just under 10 per cent. That, admittedly, would be sufficient to see the man off, but the question is, will Berlusconi manage to whittle it away even more? We won’t however, know, because Italian electoral law dictates that no opinion polls can be held in the last two weeks of campaigning.

I should imagine that from Paris, Madrid and Berlin everyone is keeping his or her fingers crossed that The Buffoon is not returned to power. Because if he is that could well be curtains to all the good work in restoring the Italian economy Monti has done. And that could mean the curtain could go up in the – in my view long overdue – final act of the tragedy that is the euro. For once Italy falls, as it might, Spain will follow, then France. Germany’s Angela Merkel faces the electorate  in just over seven months and if the euro is going to the wall, she will know full well, ideals or not, that no electorate will be won over with exhortations to dig even deeper in their pockets to bail out their European cousins. No sir.

On the other hand, of course, Bersani might well squeak home and be in a strong enough position to form a government. Who knows.

And where does the leave yesterday’s ‘coming man’ the ‘Catholic gay poet’ Nichi Vendola. Well, exactly nowhere. When I first came across him courtesy of a radio documentary he was, indeed, the coming man of the Left and the one everyone ‘in the know’ predicted would be challenging Silvio Berlusconi at the next general election. Well, that was obviously news to our Mr Bersani, who is the man doing the challenging on Sunday and Monday. So if anyone assures you in any way that your are a ‘coming man’ or a ‘coming woman’, do the decent think and withdraw from public life gracefully, though sharpish, before you are obliged to withdraw from public life with rather less grace and a lot of egg on your face.

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Quite apart from all that annoying business with the euro which might or might not blow up, Spain’s prime minister Mariano Rajoy has been facing demands that’s he should resign over  corruption allegations. I didn’t know until I heard it on a recent edition of the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent (available on all good online radios, laptops and desktops) that the Spanish have a phrase, something of a linguistic shrug of the shoulders, which loosely translated means ‘well, that’s how it is’. It is a philosophical attitude which allows many to cope with some of the shit life throws their way.

But it would seem that Spain is becoming increasingly fed up with corruption, which (according to the FOOC correspondent) is rather more  widespread than I imagined. Quite a few people are at it. The examples given was slipping your doctor a fistful of euros to shift you


up the list to an estate agent agreeing not to charge you an extra 250 euros if he doesn’t have to give you’re a receipt for the money you have just paid him for some other business. On Wednesday Rajoy gave the Spanish equivalent to an address to the nation in which he pledged to cut down on party political spending blah-di-blah. What he didn’t address were the claims that he, too, has been busily stuffing used €10 euro notes into his underpants.

And what about Greece, the perpetual basket case whose government is so broke that hospitals are open for a day other month but whose national wealth is still quite fabulous (not paying taxes being seen, according to my brother, as a national patriotic duty, one which came from the days when Greece was ruled by those horrible Turkish Ottomans. It also helpfully means you have a bit more moolah to spend on all the goodies you want to treat yourself to)? Well, Athens was hit by several hours of heavy rain and a thunderstorm and is now ankle-deep in water everywhere. Which only goes to show that it never rains but it pours. (If I get negative feedback about that, admittedly rather weak, joke, I promise to withdraw it.)

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I keep and eye on ‘the stats’ of this blog (should that be the ‘stats’ or ‘the’ stats? I don’t know. Suggestions please and all silly ones will be acted upon) and I am astounded to discover that one particular entry (this one) has been viewed more than twice as much as the next most popular entry — 4,031 times. At the time of writing this — March 2, 2013, at 10.06am, this blog as been views 38,128 times, so more than 10 per cent of those viewings are of that one entry. Why? Well, when I delve deeper into ‘the stats’ and look at ‘referring sites’, a great many of them are visited by people tracking down a well-known picture (left) of Mandy Rice-Davies (‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he’). So it has occurred to me to include that picture (and this preamble explaining what I’m doing) in every blog entry in an attempt to drum up visitors and encourage them to take a look at some other entries. It helps that when the picture was taken, she was a rather attractive woman.

Some of tomorrow's TV highlights here in Old Blighty: can you wait?

I do so hate to be thought a party-pooper or a misery guts, but I am beginning to wonder about the sanity of my fellow countrymen, or at least those who choose to spend their evenings glued to what my grandfather used to call the ‘idiot’s lantern’. The Critics’ Choice of the TV programmes on tomorrow (February 19, 2013) which is appearing in the paper published by my highly respected employers’ (may God protect and preserve them and all their cattle, praise the Lord) includes the following not-to-be-missed gems: on BBC 2 at 9pm The Railways: Keeping Britain On Track, the second of a six-part series you will get the chance to meet staff and passengers at Leeds station and hear what they have to say. I really can’t wait.

If that doesn’t float your boat, you can tune into Litter Wars on BBC 1 at 10.35pm which promises to be a fascinating account of folk who are fed up with all the waste and litter on our streets and are taking ‘matters into their own hands’. Well!

Pick Of The Day, which I assume is rated by the papers critics to be even more interesting, is The Friend Chicken Shop: Life In A Day, which takes a ‘unique, warts and all’ look at – well life in a chicken takeaway. That is on Channel 4, but also at 9pm, so if you want to see both it and the in-depth look at life on a railway platform, you’ll have to record one and watch it later. Decisions, decisions, the bane of our lives.

History is made as British Prime Minister gets Pope's go-ahead to marry his guinea pig. And Queen sensationally found hiding in Leicester car park

Well, the cat’s is out of the bag: David Cameron has pulled it off. He has persuaded the House of Commons to allow a man to marry another man and is now free to make an honest man of Nick Clegg, though what fiery Spanish Mrs Clegg (a one-time flamenco dancer, apparently, who can rustle up a mean tortilla) will make of it is yet to be seen. But who will now still insist that Britain is living in the Dark Ages? There will still be the nay-sayers, but please walk with me on this one and give them all the traditional two-fingered salute.

Our Prime Minister is now free to marry his Deputy and the fact that they are both men is no longer a barrier. I understand they don’t much like each other and bicker all the time, but are staying together for the sake of their principles, so it could well be a real, traditional marriage. I trust this will end all the loose talk that we still send our social workers up chimneys and have no idea what to do with vegetables except boil them for several hours until we can be certain they are dead. (Apparently, the latest scientific thinking is that vegetables do actually feel pain and the Dutch and Germans are already considering banning the practice of boiling them to death, although – surprise, surprise – the French and Spanish are dead against any such ban and claim the practice is a vital part of their natural heritage, like killing geese by stuffing them full of corn and teasing bulls to death.)

There are still many benighted fools who insist that marriage was, is and always should be between a man and a woman, and that if God had wanted man to marry his pets, he would have made them far prettier (the pets, that is, not man). But you and I, as intelligent,

‘Don't raise your hopes, Norman. I've got a feeling that Brad Pitt is already spoken for’
© Mac/Daily Mail/Associated Newspapers/Whoever gets the money rational, drinking people, know full well that whether you are for or against man marrying his pets is a generational matter: those of us who grew up with the traditional view that ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ are simply incapable of adapting to change, whereas our younger folk almost to a man and woman regard it as an example of progress at its finest. (Billy Bragg has already written a song about it.)



To be blunt: opposing this legislation seems to me quite sufficient grounds for introducing euthanasia throughout the European Union. It would demonstrate quite clearly that nothing can stand in the way of progress, but there would be the added benefits that our struggling Western economies would see pressure on their pension arrangements eased considerably and it would be a very welcome shot in the arm for Europe’s funeral parlour sector who have been having rather a lean time of it of late, what with advances in medicine and the average lifespan growing ever longer. So a cheer all round please: thank you Mr Cameron and all the best for your future union with Mr Clegg

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 It is a measure of just how momentous the ‘man can now marry his pets’ legislation is that a similarly quite astounding piece of news has passed almost unnoticed. We woke up on Monday morning to be warned that although scientists were still performing tests and were remaining ‘tight-lipped’ on the matter, it seemed likely that the Queen has been buried in a car park in Leicester and had been there for several days.

What was particularly concerning about the news – and despite official caution, there can be little doubt that it was true – was that there were no reports at all from any of her palaces, castles and other residences that she had been missing. None. Not a sausage. Her Majesty of The Cinque Ports, Her Regal Holiness and Britain’s Favourite Granny (to give her some of lesser-known titles) has been leading an increasingly quieter life these past years (the word is that all the training for her celebrated parachute jump last August over Hackney rather took it out of here – she is, after all, well over 50) and is said to like nothing better these days than to retire to the Buckingham Palace conservatory with a copy of Woman’s World and a mug of tea. You would have thought that after she had not been seen for several hours, someone in the Royal Household would have raised the alarm. But apparently not.

The good news is that although she was completely buried in the car park, she was not dead. One report even claimed she was rather annoyed to have been discovered, the suggestion being that she had engineered the whole incident in an attempt to lead some kind of private life, but in a statement The Palace (you can find it in full here) confirmed that The Queen had indeed been found in the car park in Leicester and would appear at a special Press conference later this week. No further explanation was given.

Prince Charles issued a statement saying ‘one is relieved at the happy outcome of this matter’. When approached by journalists, Prince Phillip simply told them to ‘fuck off’, and Prince Andrew was out of the country. In a joint statement Princes William and Harry said they were glad that The Queen was ‘all right’, and Prince William’s sister-in-law Pippa Middleton revealed she had already been in touch with publisher to write a book about the matter. Should be a humdinger!

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These things are, of course, always a matter of opinion, but as far as I am concerned the rot started when darts began to be televised. It got worse: last week, admittedly on daytime TV when most people are dead, we had a documentary on a day in the life of a bailiff.

 Tomorrow BBC2 (once seen as the ‘thinking man’s channel’ now just the channel for conceited folk who think they have a brain and will only watch BBC1 if they’re sure no one will find out) at 8pm there is Planning Process. This shows the ups and downs of life as a town planner.

This week ‘officers in the Borders consider an application to erect a shed – for 169,000 chickens – while a homeowner has been dumping rubbish in his garden for 20 years’. And our broadcasters have been dumping rubbish on TV for quite a bit longer. You’ll gather that I don’t bother watching I’m A Celebrity …, Big Brother, Cooking On Ice or Celebrity Traffic Warden. I prefer to watch paint dry. I shall keep you posted on further not-to-be-missed programmes on TV here in the UK. Should get foreign visitors to the blog green with envy.

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I keep and eye on ‘the stats’ of this blog (should that be the ‘stats’ or ‘the’ stats? I don’t know. Suggestions please and all silly ones will be acted upon) and I am astounded to discover that one particular entry (this one) has been viewed more than twice as much as the next most popular entry — 4,031 times. At the time of writing this — March 2, 2013, at 10.06am, this blog as been views 38,128 times, so more than 10 per cent of those viewings are of that one entry. Why? Well, when I delve deeper into ‘the stats’ and look at ‘referring sites’, a great many of them are visited by people tracking down a well-known picture (left) of Mandy Rice-Davies (‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he’). So it has occurred to me to include that picture (and this preamble explaining what I’m doing) in every blog entry in an attempt to drum up visitors and encourage them to take a look at some other entries. It helps that when the picture was taken, she was a rather attractive woman.