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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We each take something different from a work of art, be it music, a picture, a novel or a poem. Great art resonates in many ways, depending on the psychological receptiveness of the person concerned.

Last week we heard that W.E. Henley’s very personal verse, Invictus gets our stranger-than-fiction Prime Minister through the night.

There have been many erudite comments on this choice, and on the poem itself, which is a self-glorification of the writer using attributes that a normal man would not ascribe to himself, but would be delighted if others did.

Henley had an excuse for his misery in that he suffered years of agonising illness and disability, including the amputation of part of a leg, and the potential loss of the other one. This was in Victorian times when amputation techniques scarcely varied from those of a butcher’s shop.

So what attracts Gordon Brown to Invictus? He mentions Nelson Mandela who also admired the work, probably because he spent decades in a South African prison. Here Brown is trying to associate himself with a greater leader than himself.

We also remember his rather immature attempts to curry favour with Barack Obama soon after his election, especially the cringing speech he gave in Scotland which included the line: “I wish I could have brought him home with me.” Wrapped up like a fish, perhaps?

Clearly, this is a man with problems in what is fashionably called “self-esteem”, and needs to bask in the glow of more luminous personalities.

Let’s look at what Brown wants us to take from the poem and link to his name:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Brown is romanticizing his weaknesses with the grand rhetoric of fortitude and personal destiny. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the final couplet, “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul”, is both unknowable and wildly improbable.

This is a man with hardly a shred of self-knowledge, who defines himself by other people’s actions and other writers’ words, hoping that some of the shine will rub off on him. He’s like a schoolboy who clings to his heroes to find an identity for himself.

Margaret Thatcher wrapped herself in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, which is also stuffed with Victorian values. Yet her choice is more of a manual on how to “be a Man, my son!”, rather than a paean of praise to oneself. The first verse contains good advice for Gordon Brown:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

The line: “Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,” should be emblazoned on Brown’s office wall.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much.

The Prime Minister’s virtue is in need of an MOT. I would recommend a complete replacement instead of an overhaul.

And finally:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

However, I imagine Henley depicts Gordon Brown’s future more appropriately than Kipling’s:

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade …

John Evans

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Discussing Royal matters recently, I hazarded a guess that the seemingly never-ending “romance” between Prince William and Kate Middleton may have a simple cause.

Suppose both of them are as disgusted with the state of British politics, and the crumbling of national institutions, as the rest of us. Not an outrageous proposition, I would suggest.

Might they not decide to postpone a wedding until a Conservative Government is returned to Westminster?

Way off the mark? Well, consider that both Prince William and Prince Harry went to the same school, Eton, as the next Prime Minister, David Cameron. They will have met and found they have much in common, despite Cameron’s need to play down his lineage and education in these dark, equality-obsessed times. In private, it would be different, of course.

Which brings me to the point: how different will Britain be when a Tory Government marches into Downing Street, Whitehall, and Westminster?

I think the mood will be spectacularly improved. The nation will breathe a gigantic sigh of relief at finally getting rid of the fetid rump of the most disastrous, dishonest and unpatriotic administration in living memory.

Next summer will bring an explosion of renewal and optimism across the country. Despite the ongoing depression, and the prospect of hard times to come, the lift in the national mood will be palpable. There will be the sense of a nation reborn.

We shouldn’t get too carried away, of course. David Cameron will be presented with the toughest remit of any incomer apart from Barack Obama. That the US President is still widely admired at home and abroad should give our man some sustenance.

Even Obama’s expensive healthcare-for-all plans could actually save America money when compared with the massive 17pc of GDP currently spent on schemes that leave big chunks of the population without any healthcare at all.

Counter-intuitive it may be, but a massive revamp is needed — the three giant US car companies are practically bankrupt it seems because of ongoing costs of healthcare provision for their workforces.

Thus, reform of what in Britain are public-sector leviathans can be presented as opportunities for betterment, rather than slash-and-burn operations against an undoubted culture of greed, mismanagement, and narrow self-interest.

The herd of rhinos in the broom cupboard, of course, are the big public-sector unions, which have the power to terrify ministers and taxpayers alike. Whichever way it’s done, it won’t be easy.

But back to the public mood. There’s no doubt that much will change in Britain psychologically when Brown and his ragtag camp followers depart the scene. The electorate is weary of this bunch of lying losers.

So, will the mood last, and if not, when will the clouds of British gloom once more pervade the national consciousness?

This will depend on Cameron’s ability to instill optimism into the country, despite its economic and political woes. One way to do that, I’ve suggested before.

Margaret Thatcher in her prime would instinctively and unerringly sense the once-in-a-century opportunity for a new Government now. An open goal is awaiting a new leader to negotiate a robust trade agreement with the European Union, while withdrawing from the political and legal entanglements of membership.

Nothing would give such a boost to British self-esteem and pride than the ceremonial dumping of 200,000 pages of Brussels regulation and “directives” in the English Channel.

Nothing would do more to improve the working of Parliament than ditching the rubber-stamp committee for the 75pc of laws that now come from Brussels.

Nothing would bring MPs more back in touch with their voters than ceasing to have to explain why a raft of hated laws, from “green” oddities to bin collections and alien measurements, are really nothing to do with us, guv, honest.

Cameron and the Tories need a big start. Not just a 100-day blitzfest of “eye-catching” measures that add up to less than a row of beans. We’ve been there, done that, and got the body armour.

What the new Prime Minister needs is one big idea that will shape and define his premiership — and his place in history. A mosaic of small technical adjustments will be more of the same.

Cameron should be bold and grasp the national mood for beneficial change. He should go where the cowardly Brown and the vacuous Blair have feared to tread.

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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Imagine visiting the newly elected President of a major friendly country in a time of economic stress, and arguing that the very people who elected him to office should not be given preference in his decisionmaking. Instead, they should be delivered up to the abstract opinions of unaccountable international bureaucrats.

1. Who would be so insensitive to the democratic settlement even to harbour thoughts of more global institutions?
2. Who could be so boneheaded as to set foot in “the land of the free” arguing the ideas of international socialism and world government?
3. Who on earth would then start talking about a “special relationship”?

The answer to all three is: Gordon Brown.

It was apparent from the barely-disguised “when will this end?” expressions on Barack Obama’s face that he was not particularly impressed by Brown. Furthermore, he’s not going to deliver anything of substance at the G20 Brownfest in London next month.

Let’s be clear, mild protectionism — as in “ABC jobs for ABC workers” — is an absolute duty of faith to anyone ELECTED by the people of a nation state. That is the democratic bargain. Why vote, otherwise?

Believing it’s almost a crime to be partisan towards your electorate in hard times is a mental disability for politicians. It places your own sensibilities before the needs of those you are elected to defend. In other words, it’s an act of unforgivable selfishness.

In the second chapter of the Indian Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is about to lead his army into battle against nearby enemy forces. He’s helped of course by having Krishna, “the supreme personality of Godhead”, as his charioteer.

“How can I fight these people,” he says, “they are my uncles, cousins and nephews?”

Krishna replies, “Because it’s your duty to protect your own people. You are their leader. They have no-one else. Your task is clear. Fight and win the day. The time for compassion is when the battle is over and your people are safe.”

Gordon Brown needs to rethink his “moral compass” and decide between his overblown intellectual pretensions and the people he is contracted to support and defend. Let him read the Bhagavad Gita and recognize that he too is confronted with Arjuna’s Dilemma.

This is no time for self-indulgent student Marxism.

John Evans

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