The real Dave stands up - by Richard... Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The real Dave stands up - by Richard... Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Euroslime Dave is pleading "frustration" at having to support the EU bailout scheme, complaining that he was dropped in it by Labour, and will now have to find billions to bail out Portugal.

Yet, here he is in November last (above), actually speaking up for the bailout scheme, saying we have to support it. "We have a very open economy and therefore stability in other countries has an impact on the UK".

But the, if we go back to May, just when Dave is complaining that he was dropped in it by Labour, the redoubtable Bruno Waterfield informs us that the deal was set up by qualified majority voting. In other words, it would not have made a blind bit of difference whether it had been Labour or Cleggerons, the outcome would have been the same (see below).

Of course, it is a classic Cleggeron tactic to blame Labour – as indeed we got so used to hearing about eighteen years of "Tory misrule" from Labour, but in this instance, the blame lies fairly and squarely with our membership of the European Union.

And there we see the real Euroslime coming to the fore. He is quite happy to slag off Labour, any day of the week, but when it comes to his darling EU, not a word of criticism will he utter. It would never do to let the voters know that he is just as powerless as the rest of them.

But the whole spat is a con anyway. It turns out that, back in May, Dave agreed with Labour that the bail-out fund should be set up, as there was nothing that could be done to stop it. However, the poor little lad seems to forget we have internet now, so we can see exactly the games he is playing. The real Dave has just stood up - and it shows.

Take your pick - by Richard...

If it was simple enough to understand, it probably wouldn't be a problem. But with the media all over the place, different figures being splattered about and any number of divergent opinions, you just know that something extremely serious is going down.

I refer, of course, to the looming Portuguese bail-out, which now has Ewald Nowotny, a governing council member of the European Central Bank, pitching in telling Portugal that it should take the money. Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of Eurogroup, is also at it, saying he thinks Portugal would need an aid package worth €75 billion, and there are many more besides, all telling this benighted country to take the money.

This is getting like that dreadful TV game show, Take Your Pick, where the contestants had to answer a few simple questions and then decide whether to "take the money" or "open the box". In this case, the box is Pandora's box, and there ain't no prizes inside, but the money is no big deal either, because it comes at a hefty price.

Needless to say, Portugal is not on its own. Ireland is trying to secure an extra €60bn (£52bn) of medium-term funding from the ECB to replace emergency temporary help given to the banking sector by Ireland's central bank. They are all in a rush before yawning gaps are discovered in the banking system, with some pundits suggesting that Ireland's biggest banks need as much as €15bn to €20bn of extra capital.

Then there's Spain, which has so many people rushing to say how everything is fine that you just know that it is teetering on the edge. Certainly, when The Guardian says "there are no fundamental reasons to fear a Spanish sovereign debt crisis", start getting seriously worried.

But the really interesting thing is the Financial Times (no link), which is reminding us that the bit of witchcraft last week, with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), isn't due to get started until 2013 and won't be fully funded until mid-2017, with a paid-up capital base of €80bn – if at all. But that leaves the current bail-outs to be dealt with under current mechanisms, including ECB black magic and IMF hand-outs.

And that, as the Irish are finding out, is a different sort of game. It's called Hobson's choice – any which way you turn, you get shafted ... although it could be Morton's fork. Either way, even opening Pandora's box would be a better bet.

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Dem cuts - by Richard... Sunday, March 27, 2011

Nothing new to this blog's readers, but Booker has a go at the "increasingly surreal state of our public finances", as highlighted by several events last week, not least the Budget. There, those who could stomach listening to the preposterous Osborne, will recall that he claimed he was intended to encourage growth in the economy while continuing to remedy the hole in our bank balance created by the last government's reckless overspending.

Yet, despite the general impression that the Cleggerons are cutting back on public spending – as Channel 4's Jon Snow put it, we are facing the most severe cuts since World War Two – the budget revealed that our spending will in fact increase even faster than we were told it would last October.

In the small print of last year's spending review, little George told us that annual spending was due to rise from £696 billion to £739 billion in four years' time. In the small print of last week's Budget, spending is projected to rise from £694 billion this year to £743.6 billion in 2014-15, an increase of some £50 billion. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that we should be throwing money at the Libyan adventure, to which effect Booker brings up the issue of the million-pound Storm Shadow missiles.

That invites a rather entertaining comment that "Baroness" Ashton's remuneration and pension package, servants, cars, homes and expenses, amount to about £1m per annum, same as the missile. Why don't we drop her on the Libyans?

If we could then enlist the RAF to drop off the 500,000 or so who were demonstrating against the "cuts" yesterday, then we might at last have found something useful for the junior service to do – even if Ryanair could probably do it cheaper.

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The tyranny of the crowd - by Richard... Saturday, March 26, 2011

As the public sectariat go on the march to protect their grip on our wallets, Liam Halligan, chief economist at Prosperity Capital Management, asks a few questions:

Why aren't Osborne and Co. explaining these catastrophic realities [of our debt serving costs] and their impact on our medium-term ability to maintain our public services, using them to rally support for austerity measures that are long overdue? Why aren't such stark facts thrown back into the face of those who claim that the Tories' retrenchment plans are "driven by ideology rather than necessity"?

The answer, he then says, is "fear and a lack of respect". Fear that the British public would be critical of such candour. And a lack of respect for their intelligence.

It is that latter response which caught my eye. You can treat the British public in one of two ways. Either, they are the gormless, lumpen masses of the type that we see marching today in London. Or they are thinking individuals. There is a huge overlap, the difference being between "the crowd", and the individual.

The crowd has an animal intellect, and reacts emotionally. It has no IQ, as such. Only the individual thinks – and the decisions made will vary according to whether the individual is in charge, or subsumed by the crowd psychology. "Osborne and Co" cannot see individuals. They see the crowd, without intellect ... the "sheeple" to be led by the nose and deceived.

And there, it suddenly occurred to me why they do it. Because they can. Voting, although done in the privacy of a polling booth, is a "crowd" activity. People don't vote. The "crowd" does. And that's how the likes of Osborne and Co get elected in the first place. The get elected by the crowd.

How you change that, I don't rightly know, but if we can't change the electorate, we have to change the system. Otherwise our politicians will continue to have a lack of respect for our intelligence and, as we observed, will continue taking the piss.

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