What went wrong? everyone is asking — as if it isn’t obvious.

German coach, Franz Beckenbauer got part of it right when he said that the English Premier League, with its two cup competitions, leaves players exhausted by early summer and “burnt out” before major international competitions: the European Championship and the World Cup.

This is known as the Headless Chicken Syndrome, which was clearly visible in the team’s performances in South Africa. What to do about it?

1. Reduce the league by one third and disallow Premier clubs from playing in what used to be called the League Cup. That would help. What else?

2. Back in the early 1990s, Denmark failed to qualify for the European Nations Cup. The players were dismissed for the summer and they trailed off to the Med for a spot of the sybaritic life.

A few weeks later, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists, had to withdraw because of the wars in the Balkans. As next in line, Denmark was called up for the Finals. Back trooped the sun-soaked team, with no preparations whatever for the matches. They won the Championship.

England should adopt a similar relaxation routine before major tournaments.

3. I would also scrap the manager’s position and select an experienced team captain to pick the team and lead it on the pitch. That would meld the players better, and eliminate neurotic influences off the pitch and from the sidelines. It would also save the FA around £12 million a throw.

I’m no expert on football, but surely the team couldn’t do any worse under the Syntagma Regime?

The eurozone, and hence the European Union, is dying. Like a rotting mackerel in moonlight, it shines and stinks.

Labour’s continual bleating about “supporting the economy” for another year, now seems like a reedy squeak amid the worldwide scramble for retrenchment. California alone is said to have cut its spending this year by as much as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania and Hungary combined, despite Obama’s scratchy comments against European deficit cutting.

The major cause of this growing panic is the eurozone’s acute sovereign debt crisis and the approaching European banking collapse. There’s not enough money to solve these problems. They won’t go away. The fuse is lit.

The Bank for International Settlements has stated that sovereign debt problems are nearing boiling point in half the world economy.

Unless Germany immolates itself to save the Mediterranean countries, a bewildering realignment of nations is about to take place. America can probably sit this out, given its self-sufficiency and huge in-house resources. With the Fed printing money again at industrial levels, the US will get through this crisis, emerging at a lower level of wealth, but comparatively richer than the rest of the world. China is not immune either and may have severely overstretched its resources.

For Continental Europe, almost certainly it will mean the splitting of the eurozone and the end of the European Union as we have known it. Quite how it will fragment, and what bits will be left clinging to each other is hard to say. But Germany will have to regurgitate the south of Europe and retrench within itself by relaunching the deutschmark. Berlin is said to be printing the banknotes as I write this.

Other northern countries will follow suit, while negotiating their own relationship with the central-European giant.

The UK — luckily, and only just, under a Tory regime — will retreat into itself and sort out the inherent problems. With discipline it could emerge the stronger for it.

The resulting chaos looks set to mark the end of the post WW2 global settlement of downgrading nation states in a world run by international socialists. In the longer run, despite the chaos, this could be a positive development.

Annoyment of the Week

Fairness is a very annoying word. It’s being used obsessively in British political discourse now. Why?

Ask someone to define it and it usually boils down to: “something that works to my advantage”. That’s how Gordon Brown’s Labour Party defined it. So too the Liberal Democrats who now use it more often than Labour, even from within the Coalition.

For most people, a vague sense of Robin Hood hangs about “fairness”. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is seen to be fair, although taking anything that is not yours is clearly stealing.

In olden days, the Sheriff of Nottingham would store his loot … er … taxes in large caskets piled up in his personal treasury. There it would lie, perhaps for years, a huge chunk of spending power wrenched out of the local economy. No wonder they were mostly dirt poor.

Today, the wealthy are the main drivers of economic activity by investing their treasure in companies via the stock exchange or in special bank deposits. Cash is recycled into the most profitable channels, boosting jobs and growth.

Thus, if you take from the rich and give it to the poor, who do not invest because they have no surplus, you are depriving the economy of much of its driving force. In the end, that penalizes the poor most.

The simple concept of fairness used by politicians is merely a vote catcher. It has no validity in the real world. It’s usually linked with “equality” which doesn’t exist in reality either. A top-down equality, forced by the state, would look very like North Korea.

Real political fairness is when everyone has a genuine job, not a portfolio of welfare benefits.

David Cameron did very well at the G20 in Toronto. He has a natural way of being a Prime Minister that allows him to get along with all the others.

Where Gordon Brown had to chase Barack Obama into a hotel kitchen to beg for a bilateral on-camera, Cameron sat easily side by side with him, exchanging bottles of beer and jokes, while hitching a lift in the President’s personal helicopter. Obama even mentioned the “special relationship”, a subject which embarrasses most British people I know, because it’s not something that should be talked about.

I think Cameron is aware that “the business of America is business”. If you can do business, you’re special, if not, not.

Brown never came across as special. David Cameron does.

David Miliband says his worst mistake was not eating that banana before he hit the streets during the Party Conference.

Why would anyone walk out of their hotel carrying a banana anyway? Did he think it was cool? Was it his Mr Bean moment? Did he suppose it would humanize him?

He was offering himself for the leadership of the party at the time. Which party did he think it was? The Orangutan’s? Is he trying to tell us something?

On Newsnight last week he was in a hustings line-up for the Labour party leadership … again. What qualities could he bring to the job? Well, he said, “I wrote the Climate Change Bill”.

Most of the programme’s audience must have glazed over with thoughts of nine slop buckets in every kitchen, and a bill of £18 billion a year until 2050 to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint by 80%.

No other country is offering anything like as much. It will bankrupt future generations and lop only 1% from global carbon emissions. In other words, it will have no effect whatever. That Bill is now the law of the land.

Neither David Miliband, nor his even more geeky brother, Ed, can ever be trusted with the leadership of Britain. After Gordon Brown, we should investigate every leader they put up for the job with scrupulous cynicism.

The Mili brothers have already ruled themselves out.

Picture of the Week

The River Exe last Sunday morning. Click through twice on the pic for a larger image.

Photo by John Evans

John Evans

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Syntagma has just received a personal email from Ben Bernanke at the US Federal Reserve. Here it is in full:

Federal Reserve Banks
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
33 LIBERTY STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10038,

Attn: Honourable beneficiary,

Contract fund credit from bank federal reserve board

This is to let you know that we received a payment credit instruction from the federal government of Nigeria to credit your account with your full inheritance fund of us $10.5million from the Nigerian reserve account with our bank.

However, what we required from you is your banking particulars where you want your fund to be transferred.

{1}. Your full name and address….
{2}. Your telephone, and fax………….
{3). Your bank name and address……….
{4). Your a/c name and numbers………….
(5). Your swift code / routing numbers…….
(6) .Your current occupation…………………….

Be informed that transfer will commence immediately we hear from you with the account information. Once more, bank Federal Reserve board will not hesitates to credit your account within 24hours in accordance with fund release order regulations.

Your immediate response is highly needed to enable us commence for the transfer.

Thanks for banking with Federal Reserve Bank while we looking forward to serving you better.

Congratulation to your inheritance fund.

Thanks and God bless you.

Regards,
Mr. Ben s. Bernanke
Director Federal Reserve Bank New York

Why does the word “Nigeria” make me suspicious that this may not be all it seems? I didn’t even know I banked with the Fed.

Mysterious.

John Evans

Syntagma Books’ next title is a republication of one of my favourite John Buchan novels, Huntingtower. I wrote about it in a recent diary entry under Gorbals Die-hards

There follows an extract from a 1922 newspaper review of the book — paper and writer unknown:

August 4th 1922
MR. BUCHAN’S LATEST ROMANCE

As a piquant novelty Mr. Buchan has hit upon the device of introducing a band of ragged Glasgow lads, [the Die-hards] formed into an unofficial body of boy scouts. In the exuberance of their youth, they march to such songs as “Class-conscious are we, and class-conscious wull be, Till our fit’s on the neck of the Boorjoyzee”, learned by one of their members at a Socialist Sunday school. But these are battle hymns, sung for the sake of their rhythm, without regard to their meaning, and the boys are unreservedly, not to say violently, on the side of law and order.

Priceless. How could you resist?

John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, was a Conservative MP and Governor-General of Canada.

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown-free zone

For your eyes only. Keep this under your hat.

Met Office official alert for November. Dated: October 30.

“November heralds the return of autumn”

I could have told them that after a quick glance at the calendar.

Or could it be a secret coded message as used to appear in The Times in Sherlock Holmes’s day: “Die Wetter ist besser im sommer”.

“Watson, I have it! The weather is better in summer. Germany will invade England between June and August.”

“But, Holmes, surely not during the Ashes series.”

David Milibug, aka Miliband, Britain’s putative Foreign Secretary, is playing a devious, but rather obvious, game of seeking the yet-to-be-created post of foreign minister of the European Union.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether he gets the wretched job or not. He’s welcome to it. Its only reward is to provide ego cover and material support through the long period of the Labour wilderness years to come.

After his unforgivably inaccurate attacks on the future Foreign Secretary, William Hague, this week, he will get little succour from the new Whitehall.

With little brother, Ed, a possible leader of the Labour rump after the election, and doomed to fail, he will know that the seat is being ably kept warm for him when he returns from exile.

And what of Mandy Pandy? Big Pete has always lusted after the Foreign Office, ever since his grandpapa, Herbert Morrison, held the post for all of seven months after the war. There are seven months left of this Parliament. Mandy could hardly resist.

It all sounds so cosy. The words “world” and “oyster” suggest themselves.

Not so fast. Labour’s coming drubbing in the polls is likely to be savage. As Chesterton put it:

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Did you know that in 1728, the Royal Bank of Scotland became the first bank in the world to offer overdraft facilities? Apparently so.

RBS was established to provide a bank with strong Hanoverian and Whig ties to England, as the rival Bank of Scotland was involved in raising funds for the Jacobite Rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was missing out on the “Royal” title even before he set off for Derbyshire and his nemesis.

Two banks at war. Two banks now in the wars. History and politics are never far from large concentrations of money.

Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, worked for RBS in his early days, probably blissfully unaware that he was consorting with the “enemy”

Isn’t life grand?

For New Labour:

We each have a personal myth, a story which builds gradually from our parent’s stories, our cultural myth, and many other factors. In this story, we are the main character, other people are secondary characters. They, however, have their own stories, which are usually radically different from ours.

Society is built on resolving the clash of these personal myths. Civilizations are constructed to preserve collective and national myths. When powerful people’s inner stories meet in dissent, whole continents can dissolve into war.

Such is the power of our personal story. Most people are not in command of their story because it’s formed from a ragbag of inherited ideas, and pressures from all manner of influences. This leads us to devalue ourselves and splits us from our essential authenticity.

That is the thesis of Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican doctor and surgeon, who grew up in the tradition of the Toltecs. In his book, The Voice of Knowledge, he distils it into four principles, or agreements, as he prefers to call them. At first sight, they could be taken for a boy scout’s creed : tell the truth, don’t take things personally, don’t jump to conclusions, and do your best. But this would be to miss the point. Used as talismans of action, the Four Agreements become a powerfully transformative path to happiness and success.

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

Strongly recommended to all members of the outgoing Cabinet.

Watch out, the zealots are coming.

Who mediates the media? The answer is, in almost all cases, the zealots.

Zealots have a long history. You may remember them from the New Testament. Whatever the purpose, there is always zealotry in there somewhere.

Far from history being driven by “the economy, stupid”, as the Marxist zealots insist, it is in fact powered by all manner of zealousness.

Now, there is nothing wrong with some elements of zeal per se. Without enthusiasm there would be no progress, and probably no fun either. But we must distinguish between zealotry and enthusiasm. The latter is harmless, the former has an unbreakable intent.

Since the media — especially television — will not tolerate anyone who is dull or superficially uninteresting, the zealots have a head start in the race to be media performers, and even controllers of the pipes.

That brings us on to what a zealot does and why zealotry is bad for us.

The present zealotry can be summed up in a few words and phrases: “European Union”, “New Labour”, “carbon footprint”, “green”, “climate change”. Even religion has become the possession of zealots the world over.

Zealots rule. They mediate us from their positions in the media, religion, politics, education and much of current discourse.

If we refuse to follow their harsh prescriptions, they have ways of subtly ostracizing us from society, with weasel words like “right wing”, “eccentric” (once a noble estate in England), “Extremist”, “not one of us”.

In the age of an overwhelmingly powerful media, we must learn to mediate ourselves or become slaves of the new zealotry.

John Evans

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Last week Gordon Brown ditched what limited enthusiasm he had for free markets. Only government intervention will do now, he suggested, preferably by unaccountable global institutions. But what is really the best answer to the failures of the past decade?

It’s a truism that a root-and-branch reformer must admire, even love, the object of his reform if he is to be successful. Anyone who despises the area they are attempting to change will often destroy it. Gordon Brown’s running of the British economy is a classic case in point. Having failed catastrophically to create a lasting Golden Scenario, he now proposes a return to the inadequate socialism of his baby-boomer youth.

While it’s true that market economics has not covered itself with kisses in the last three years, it failed only when pushed beyond the limits of human psychology to cope.

As I have written here before, Up-To-A-Pointism (UTAP) is the answer. It works within levels humans can safely handle. That must now be the criterion of choice for policy-makers.

We know now that ordinary people don’t make rational decisions when acting in economic situations. The old idea that multiple incidents of a choice smooth out variations to a near-rational mean, is only true within limits. That’s where UTAP comes in.

I’ve long been an adherent of what I call, Up-To-A-Pointism. If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences.

Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.

Politicians and economists seem largely unaware of this iron rule of nature. They should be. Our future rests on it. It is vital that some attempt is made to determine the limits that constrain every policy decision.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of people are programmed to operate within a rather narrow band of experience — even the high-flyers among us. Once activity breaches the limits of that band, whether above or below, they are like fish without water, humans without oxygen. They rapidly lose all sense of reality.

No-one can really be trusted to behave well in the wider interest when events are excessively good or painfully bad. Unfortunately, we are moving rapidly from the former to the latter condition, where we will be no better served than we were in the wild, expansionary phase.

Whereas in the growth period we could at least fend for ourselves, we are now largely dependent on other people to lift us out of the communal mess. Many of our fellows will be in thrall to people they never intended to imbue with such power over them.

Already, politicians are behaving erratically. Gordon Brown wants to sideline market economics despite its record of success when operated within human-scale limits.

He, and others, are striving to get one-size-fits-all decision-making set up at world and continental level, areas of only the most limited applicability to what happens locally. You only have to look at how unsuccessful Brussels has been at regulating almost all of Western and parts of Eastern Europe. Not to mention the deep resentment of any laws that come from Brussels.

Up-To-A-Pointism applies to globalization too. Decisions deemed undemocratic are not accepted by large swathes of modern populations, more especially if they are seen to fail, as they often do.

It’s easy to force subprime mortgage lending on reluctant financial institutions if they can mash them up into Triple-A securities and dump them around the world like toxic waste. Here again, the limits of psychological adaptation were not appreciated by politically-motivated individuals.

For the future, there is a need to devolve decision-making to levels of clear awareness of those on the receiving end. Only they will know how real people in real situations will react.

This is no time for policy wonks, rocket scientists and Harvard alumni.

Let the people decide for themselves.

John Evans

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Here they are, the G20, a merry grouping of the world’s most powerful leaders, photographed in the wasteland of London’s depressing docks area. How did they do?

The dismal surroundings must have affected their collective judgement.

I’ve been writing here about protectionism for months, while others have dutifully mouthed the mantra: “free trade is good, protectionism is bad”.

Let’s start with some common sense: nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. Applied to the above: some free trade is good, some protectionism is bad. The reverse polarities are also true.

Walk down a street of terraced houses. Although they give the impression of a single, continuous building, they are in fact a series of individual ecosystems.

Each household has its own income, makes its own choices, decides its own way of life within the law, and is governed by its own head. The block is not a single organism in the way ants or bees live. Each property is a self-governing entity whose inhabitants may not even know most of their neighbours.

Generally, humans don’t behave like bacteria or, except at football matches, like flocks of starlings. The best of them are, above all, individuals. The best people like to be in charge of their own affairs and households.

Modern politicians, still suffering from WW2 hangovers, believe they have the right to behave like pushy neighbours and interfere in everyone else’s affairs. They don’t. It would be a better world if other people’s boundaries were respected by everyone else.

The G20 failed because it was fighting 20th-century battles. Some of those principles are worth learning, but many are out of date.

The great problem we face now is the growing divide between exporting, surplus States — China, Germany, Japan — and importing, debtor countries — the US, UK, and many of the rest.

The surpluses and deficits were very large even when the world’s economies were booming, but in a slump, they appear insurmountable.

Countries like China and Germany know they will never get their full value back. The debtor countries will simply inflate their economies — the real reason behind quantitative easing — and/or, like Britain, devalue their exchange rates to improve their international competitiveness and export themselves out of trouble. Import substitution will also push this along at the expense of the surplus exporters.

The effects of this sleight of hand dodge will be to increase tensions in the world, especially between surplus countries that lose out, and debtor States that clawback their deficits by retreating from the moral high ground. Bystander countries will draw the obvious conclusions and the world “trust index” will slump, creating ominous conditions for a new century than may turn out not very different from the last.

Back to the terraced houses, and we can see that many inhabitants are trying to improve their lot by “beggaring their neighbours”. The ecosystem where each household runs itself has collapsed in a welter of indebtedness between families, with some seeking to write off debts unfairly, and the most prudent suffering the most. Some kind of local civil war is inevitable.

The solution, clearly, is to return to individual household responsibility, not to increase the socialization of the terrace and cross indebtedness between houses.

Point One: The “progessive internationalist” approach to the world has broken down. Governments gave us this crisis, the G20 is offering more global governance.

While some countries have vast surpluses, most of it invested in dollar assets or euro bonds, their perceived prudence has now become their undoing.

Point Two: The recent high peaks of international trade were ransacking the world of resources at an unsustainable rate. Whether you believe in man-made global warming, or not, or partly, the rate at which the Earth itself was being consumed to provide shiploads of whimsical products for world consumption, has become the road to hell.

Point Three: The surplus countries created mountains of debt in the deficit countries, way beyond their annual incomes (GDP). This was clearly unsustainable. Sooner or later the bubble had to burst. It did.

The G20 has not solved the enormous problem of how to tackle the aftermath. Creating a “central bank for the world” — a beefed up IMF — with its own “global currency”, will prove as crass as previous decisions by this non-Sovereign body. The G20 has also voted for a ballooning increase in international indebtedness, with unaccountable bureaucrats overruling individual democratic nations.

It has forgotten the important lesson of the 20th century: the “great and the good” on their pinnacles of vanity don’t make better choices than the “small and the mean” at ground level.

The lesson of the early 21st century is that Nation States, which balance their books and their trade accounts, both surpluses and deficits, are vital to a stable and war-free world. Only nations can be approximations of single “organisms” … the world can’t, especially at the current level of individual human development and the great disparities between them.

The surplus nations have the biggest lessons to learn, since they will be at the receiving end of the slump. China kept its currency too cheap too long, hollowing out much of the West’s manufacturing industry. It is now reaping the whirlwind.

Germany over-specialized in sophisticated metal-bashing and is suffering a grievous loss of income as the willingness of others to buy collapses.

For us at the debtor end of the spectrum, our mistakes were general, across government, corporates and individuals. We signed up freely to a psychological contagion, promising endless wealth, and got ourselves deep in debt as a result. British authorities are allowing the exchange rate to fall and pushing up inflation by “unconventional means” so that our debts are reduced. It may well come back to bite us, but so far so murky.

The heart of the problem is not being tackled at all, except through vacuous soundbites.

The verdict on the G20 then, with its irrelevant headline decisions on tax havens, more debt, and the vapourware trillion dollar infusion “to save the world” is negative. It will do no such thing.

It will probably make it worse.

John Evans

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