Britannia Radio

He's not exaggerating very much.  Like me he thinks we're all putting 
our heads under the pillow - or behaving like Ostriches- - but he 
tells it much better
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The Sunday Times    7.12.08
An adequate way to drive to hell
Jeremy Clarkson

I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I'd been 
invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work 
out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from 
something that's now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not 
that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of 
straw and orange hair. Now it's the other way around.

Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I've never seen so 
much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which 
was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I 
careered from bar to bar all I could think was: "Jesus. Can't they 
see what's coming?"

Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand's, so how 
could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the 
hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as 
they become the first country in Europe to go officially into 
recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are 
they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

It's the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We're 
all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering 
what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want 
to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can't see the meteorite 
coming either.
I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the 
truth. It's painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and 
fiddling about with Vat, pretending that the coming recession will be 
bad. But that it can deal with it.

I don't think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior 
bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather 
different. They don't refer to the looming problems as being like 
1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They 
talk about the End of Days.
Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high 
street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever 
been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will 
mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put 
even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them 
stutters and fails.

The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went 
wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis 
arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of 
my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.

Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and 
nationalise everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And 
when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won't be 
enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I 
gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and very possibly 
the UK.

It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level 
to grapple with the consequences of all this but I'm told that in 
simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. 
The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker 
and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of 
selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them 
in the first place even. That's why another friend of mine has 
recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the 
country . . . with a kitchen garden.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. 
But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% 
of their wealth. And that's going to be a problem if you were living 
on the breadline beforehand.

Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while 
there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It'll be 
a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there's no way the 
modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will 
be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a 
while.

I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot 
some of my neighbours - maybe even David Cameron - as we fight for 
the last bar of Fry's Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was 
Chipping Norton's post office.

I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and 
that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it 
can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But 
instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the "credit 
crunch" to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair 
Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he's being interviewed.

I can't say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading 
our way and the authorities knew it couldn't be stopped or diverted, 
why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark 
until it all goes dark for real.