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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Aren’t you just sick of Charles Darwin? On his 200th birth anniversary he’s all over the media like measles.

On the BBC (where else?) David Attenborough sheds a discreet tear and religiously places a bust of the great one in the National History Museum, replacing a more deserving scientist. Richard Dawkins, the Ayatollah of Darwinism, hurls fatwas at anyone who disagrees. Even Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has a go in The Times (London): “In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry”. Pass the collection bucket!

And we still have Andrew Marr’s “film” about Darwin to come — stick to politics, Andrew, there’s a good chap.

The fact is, Darwin was wrong in his central assertion: natural selection.

Consider the development of the eye. By the minute stages of natural selection, it would have taken thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years to evolve. For most of that time the eye wouldn’t be functional. It would not carry any survival advantage at all. Clearly, it wouldn’t have survived, according to the theory of natural selection.

Unless, of course, it was deliberately protected during the long prototype stage, which would suggest a creative agency at work. I suspect Darwin himself might have preferred that outcome.

The problem with both “natural selection” and “Creationism” is that neither stands up to common-sense scrutiny. The newer, more sensible, version of Creationism, Intelligent Design — damned and blasted by the jihadists of Darwinism — is also wrongly named.

The word “design” suggests activity of the cerebral cortex, and therefore a human agency. “Intelligent” is open to the same critique.

Syntagma is happy to suggest an alternative to this “mis-seeing event” to solve a needless dispute.

Purposive Evolution. Teleology for the televisual age.

Happy to be of service.

I’ve written here a few times about the Czech Republic — currently holding the rotating Presidency of the European Council — and its inspirational Head of State, President Klaus.

Yesterday, Peter Hitchens provided us with a wide-ranging and revealing account of just what is going on inside that country for which Britain went to war in 1939: How the Czechs are fighting the marshmallow EU tyrant.

It still astonishes me that the British are reduced to depending on President Klaus — and the Irish electorate — to keep us out of the despised European constitution, currently masquerading under the pseudonym, “Lisbon Treaty”.

What does that say about our own cowardly Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who lied and lied again in the service of the nation they were meant to protect?

Klaus is ten times the man they are.

If you listen to some commentators, President Obama has failed already. Some journos even compare him to Tony Blair, as I did early in the campaign. From a British perspective, that comparison is by no means favourably intended.

Even now he reminds me of Blair in his first year of office when he said: “It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be”. Blair couldn’t have given it much prior thought, even if he had any to spare.

But there are some aspects of Obama I warm to:

“I screwed up” and “We’re in for dangerous times ahead”, are almost impossible to imagine coming from Gordon Brown.

Ditto: “We’ll do this ourselves. We won’t wait for others to act”.

The Syntagma honeymoon, such as it is, remains intact. Just.

If you’ve ever clicked on the polls at dailymail.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they usually split around 90 percent to 10. The Mail appears to know its reader demographics very well — not surprising for such a profitable newspaper.

Whenever I have a go at any of them, uncannily I always come out on the 90 percent side. I don’t think I’ve ever missed the winning mark.

Imagine, however, if identical polls were run on the Guardian/Observer site. I suspect the split would remain at 90/10 but in the opposite direction of opinion. At the muddled Independent, 50/50 would probably be the boring outcome.

So the Daily Mail polls serve no psephological purpose beyond reinforcing known attitudes and prejudices. Aren’t they just a distraction from all the pictures of semi-clad women?

President Sarkozy of France intends to cut the country’s notoriously bloated public sector and spend the money on tax cuts and shoring up essential infrastructure.

He criticizes Gordon Brown for mismanaging the British economy by piling up unprecendented levels of public debt. He also sneers at his derisory VAT cut and the waste of money propping up non-jobs in the public sector.

Brown has apparently called for an apology, and got one.

For what, precisely, was Sarkozy meant to apologize — his hurt feelings?

Quote of the Week
“You can never tiptoe lightly enough once you start building a world of eggshells. PC makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history — irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even obsolete comic stereotype — are all suddenly suspect.” Mark Steyn

Article of the Week
Global economy nears abyss as central banks dither by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

This is white-water rafting now, with Niagara ahead.

John Evans

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For those of us who have been seeking causes — and therefore culprits — for the present financial and economic turmoil, a villain is beginning to emerge. A rather shadowy, backroom boy of a villain, but a nasty one notwithstanding.

So far we’ve blamed bankers, Hank Paulson (U.S. Treasury Secretary), us — as in “we the people”, politicans (any excuse … ), Baby Boomers (easy targets), Anatole Kaletsky (newly redeemed), and Uncle Tom Hobbledehoy and all.

It seems, though, that a simpler explanation is called for. The new depression was caused by … History. Here’s how.

At the beginning of the baby-boomer-in-office period a new type of banking emerged. It mainly affected the financing of finance and its effects on the money supply. Anatole Kaletsky explains it rather well in today’s Times (London).

Let’s say GKN wants to finance new plant at a cost of £1m. Previously, it would approach a bank, say HSBC, and simply borrow the money. Thus, one million of debt would have been created and added to the money supply.

… since the 1990s, the brave new world of securitised hyper-finance has managed such a transaction in a very different way. GKN would sign a £1 million lease with General Electric Credit. GE would then sell £1 million of bonds to a special purpose vehicle, which would fund itself by selling £1 million of commercial paper to a hedge fund. This hedge fund would borrow £1 million from its prime broker, which would borrow £1 million from Barclays Capital, which would turn around and borrow £1 million through the inter-bank market from HSBC. The net result is still that GKN’s investment is financed by £1 million of deposits at HSBC. But in the process, £6 million of debt has been created instead of £1 million of debt.

The inexplicable £5m is created by a completely unregulated shadow banking system, and a host of night creatures feed off it as if it were real money. The madness of wild leveraging begins.

Anyone who has read Milton Friedman’s books knows what this means. One year to 18 months later inflation hits hard, and real, real money, like savings, is destroyed. So what’s falsely created in one way is taken away from another source as compensation.

However, History deemed otherwise in this case. It played the China Card. Trillions of dollars worth of very cheap manufactures poured out of the Middle Kingdom and other Far Eastern emerging economies, riding on the back of the fruits of the shadow banking sector.

The deflationary effect of all these cheap goods masked the inflation produced by the increase in money supply. It didn’t help that the sorcerer’s apprentice, Alan Greenspan, and his cohorts, Gordon Brown for example, conspired to keep interest rates too low for too long.

It’s no wonder the ancient Greeks gave human names to historical forces, like Hubris and Nemesis.

I was glad to hear that Barack Obama was “allowed” to keep his BlackBerry, although surprised that such a fuss was made over it. Apparently every word a President utters, writes or emails has to be recorded for posterity — and possible lawsuits.

I know how he feels. My BlackBerry Curve is rarely more than six feet away most of the time, and the corner of my eye is always watching for the little red light to flash, indicating an email has arrived in one of my three accounts.

As my business is “global” (sorry!), I get emails through the night too. The BlackBerry allows me to deal with those while still in bed in the morning.

Problems arise on days off. I’m tempted to take the blighter with me even on pleasure trips. Sometimes I reach for it in my pocket like an automaton. When it’s not there, a twinge of unwarranted anxiety assails my very conscious unconscious mind.

Getting back home, the first action is checking the mail. Inevitably, there’s nothing that wouldn’t wait.

As the Zen master put it to a fidgety Western student after three hours of meditation: “You see, the world managed without you while you were away. The grass continued to grow and the birds flew by on their own business.”

Why aren’t we that wise?

Has anyone noticed that Stephanie Flanders is back on the BBC?

The Corporation’s efficient Economics Editor has been on extended baby leave almost for ever, replaced by Hugh Pym. Great timing by Stephanie, just as a new Great Depression looms on the horizon.

Now Hugh is efficient too, but he lacks the cutting-edge star quality of La Flanders. The result is that we’ve had to put up with the strangulated vocalizing of superstar Robert Peston.

Robert is easier to take on his BBC blog. Listening to his explanations goes something like this:

“Goobledegook, goooooooble ………… degook. Eeeeeeeer, rhubarb, rhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuubarb! Gobbledeeeeee…gook!”

Nice song, but what did he say?

Last week I was solemnly informed that “wide noses are back in vogue”.

Another nose job for Michael Jackson then?

Why am I still waiting for my copy of Liberal Fascists from Amazon when Andrew Marr discussed it with the author on BBC Radio’s Start the Week this morning?

Amazon UK tells me it won’t be available until February 5 at the earliest, and it’s been on order for quite a while.

In this “globalized” age, can’t they send the text electronically and print it using on-demand technology? Waiting two years for a book to be published is surely a thing of the past?

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg

In these bewildering times, few people have noticed the splendid journalism hiding away in the Business pages of our newspapers. Probably sparsely read, the writers tirelessly chronicle the uncertainty and anxieties of our age for us and future historians to pore over.

I mentioned Anatole Kaletsky above and linked to his informative piece today. Another cracker in today’s UK Telegraph by (inevitably) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who must get a mainstream award sometime soon, is titled: The bad news is we’re back in 1931; the good news is that it’s not yet 1933.

There are many more. Together they constitute the essence of our time. Do not neglect them.

John Evans

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Listening to Evan Davis’s futile attempt to interview Gordon Brown on Friday’s Today programme, reminded me of a frantic inventor trying get his robot to perform a series of complicated tasks, while the robot insists on doing one simple thing over and over again.

Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in London

Robotic Brown repeated the same wearisome formula too many times for comfort. If the man can’t present a believable argument to the country, what on earth is he doing as Prime Minister?

Compare Barack Obama’s “We’ll do this ourselves, not wait for others to act,” with Brown’s defeatist “Britain will not emerge from recession this year unless there is emergency action in the Far East, America and Europe as well.”

The problem with “global solutions” is that they take an age to negotiate and rarely emerge as anything other than face-saving compromises. Brown’s philosophy is dead in the loch and Britain may be as well if he continues in office.

On Friday, Brown insisted that the present crisis is “completely new territory … What we did not see, nobody saw, was the possibility of market failure.”

Yet we know — from Edmund Conway who witnessed it — that three Bank of England experts warned him in the summer of 2006 that a small blip in the markets could plunge the British banking sector into widespread insolvency. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer then, why didn’t he act?

Such systemic negligence would be a capital offence in any responsive organization, but in our system only the self-serving Labour party or the Queen can sack him. It won’t happen.

David Cameron claimed this week that Brown could be forced to go to the International Monetary Fund for a cash bail out. I don’t believe the IMF would have enough money to make any difference. It’s not £2.5bn we need this time, it may well be £2.5 trillion. Not even the Americans have, or would consider parting with, such a sum right now.

Britain is on its own. Global solutions won’t materialize in the form or the strength necessary, nor is the IMF an easy way out. We only have Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling between us and economic meltdown.

Until now I’ve been uneasy about Barack Obama’s capacity to take this crisis by the scruff of the neck. But his words at least show a willingness to try.

Let’s remind ourselves of them, and wish we had a leader capable of such drive and determination:

“We’ll do this ourselves, not wait for others to act.”

What could Brown do? He could start by taking his former adviser Matthew Taylor’s advice and write off the next election — throw it to the winds, where it’s going anyway. This would give him the freedom and space to slash the grotesquely bloated public sector which he helped to create.

Of the £650bn pot, an emergency £150bn cut would be relatively easy, if painful for some. Overpaid operatives in the sector could be offered the choice between a 25 percent pay cut or redundancy. This would rebalance the public finances and make room for tax cuts.

Brown built this empire, let him now dismantle it for this country’s sake.

I’ve waited a long time for Brown to live up to the Britishness he idly claims for himself. Here’s how:

“We’ll do this ourselves, not wait for others to act.”

John Evans

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Alistair Darling says that if his second bank-bailout in Britain doesn’t work, we are doomed … bankrupt.

We should perhaps consider Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, whose speech (according to the Bard) went like this: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. … Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!”

Now imagine if Henry had used the Darling gambit: “I have to tell you, dear friends, they are a fearsome lot. We will have our work cut out against them. If we lose, our heads will be removed from our bodies and our guts will be spilled all over the battlefield.”

[Turns round to face his men] “Dear friends, where are you? Where have you gone?

Quite.

Is there anything left to say about Barack Obama. I can usually find something to write about almost anything in the universe, but I must admit, I’m stumped, especially as I like to hit an original note wherever possible.

Among the commentators, Andrew Rawnsley wrote a balanced piece yesterday, basically saying that he could fail, but that we mustn’t prejudge him. Judgement is an after-the-event activity. Presumably, as with Gordon Brown, that’s why it usually comes too late.

Hope in today’s world is certainly audacious. William Rees-Mogg goes to the brink in declaring him a great President in the making. At this stage of the game, we can’t rule that out. One nagging doubt lies at the back of my mind, though: Obama is of the left, his one soft job was as a “community organizer”. We in Britain know only too well what that means. But I’ll bite my tongue for now.

Peter McKay in today’s Mail gets closest for me, questioning Obama’s almost obsessive need to emulate Abraham Lincoln. Does he match up? No, is the sage’s answer.

We shall see.

On Saturday, Matthew Parris wrote in The Times (London) what in blogging would be called a rant. A very elegantly written rant, beautifully crafted and impeccably sourced, but a rant nonetheless.

It was a rant against … you’ve guessed it … Gordon Brown. Having done a few of those myself, I understand the occasional pressing need to let off steam in that direction. Here’s a sample of the Parris invective:

“[Gordon Brown] was from the start an appalling, raging, dithering, laptop-throwing typhoon of aggression, paranoia and insecurity.”

Flippin’ ‘eck. Steady on, old chap!

Encore, please.

I watched Michael Portillo’s contribution to Channel 4’s Christianity series last evening. His view, as a lapsed Catholic, concentrated not surprisingly on the Emperor Constantine and the very political nature of Catholicism ever since.

While it was not as challenging as Howard Jacobson’s angry and edgy Jewish perspective last week, it threw up a lot to think about.

Certainly, with two such intelligent commentators to start the show off, there’s no hint of the celebrity presenter syndrome here.

What puzzled me in both accounts, though, is that neither man picked up on the Gospels as allegory, with very deep roots in previous history.

In the absence of an invitation from Channel 4, here’s my take on this most fascinating of stories:

What is Christianity?

With the world spinning into economic turmoil, and global warming a fading glint in green eyeballs, here’s a snapshot from my neck of the forest.

A cacophony of birds on the River Exe in Devon, taken yesterday.

One event we can be sure about, spring will soon be here … even if by then we have to eat the swans.

John Evans

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With a new American President due next week, it’s a bit early to ask the famous question: “How goes the Union, Mr President?”

However, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is in a different position. We have a government that has been nearly 12 years in power. So,

How goes the Union, Mr Prime Minister?

Gordon Brown never answers questions, even at PMQs, therefore I will answer for him:

At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, Britain has a two-tier system of economic organization.

First and definitely foremost, the Public Realm, as New Labour likes to call it, is a Command economy. It commands a massive £650billion income from the non-State economy that creates Britain’s prosperity. By common consent much of this money is wasted. It has a tendency to drop off the radar as if it were dumped into landfill sites. No trace of it is ever found again.

One man, Gordon Brown, presides with an iron fist over the Command economy of Britain and has done so for 12 years. He determines its work practices by a mind-numbing system of targets and procedures.

In return, the workforce, some 25 per cent of the overall labour market, gets job security, high salaries, and gold-plated, index-linked pensions paid six or seven years earlier than those of the toilers at the wealth-creating coalface.

The inferior, or private sector, is the milch cow of the Brownian system. It comprises those who work for themselves, for partnerships or joint-stock companies. Latterly, it has seen its much-admired pension funds rifled and ruthlessly downgraded by the Prime Minister personally. Allegedly, like Robert Maxwell before him, he has freely taken from the private pension pots to fund his own agendas and client state.

To make matters worse, the private national prosperity generator has been driven at the pace of a high-performance racing car for almost a decade to feed the lust for money (”resources” as it’s coyly described) of the favoured multitude in the Command economy.

With the private sector now in a state of collapse, the tribe within the Command economy is doubly protected by job security covenants and salaries paid for by massive State borrowings against the future wages and assets of the wealth creators. The children of such folk are already indebted by government to the tune of £17,000 ($25,500) each. The burden will take a generation or more to pay off.

With the UK in economic freefall, the future of both sectors is in doubt. The public sector now needs a milch cow and a golden goose to continue its extravagant destruction of wealth. Only debt and printed money can keep it inflated. These processes show no sign of slowing down, indeed such activity is on the increase.

There’s a great deal more I could tell you about the social state of the country, its sink estates peopled by a primordial underclass, its rubble of an education system, the tattered remnants of its once proud Armed Forces, its broken-beyond-repair Constitution, and its enforced membership of the alien European Union.

But there is only so much bad news we can take, or impart, in one sitting. The nation will take its nuclear revenge when next it is permitted to enter a polling station for a General Election.

And that is the state of the British nation.

John Evans

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Our person of the year 2008 does not exist … yet.

This person, however, should exist, and we are the poorer because of the absence. So, who is it?

By all logical analysis it should be Barack Obama. Even he might agree, though, that he’s had quite enough publicity for one year already. Besides, The Times (London) has inevitably made him their choice.

You may have noticed we are not a downmarket tabloid so, contrarian as ever, we’ll resist the obvious, with ideologically correct genuflections in his direction.

During this year of wild oscillations of policy, prediction and actuality, one person was missing from the chattering soup here in Britain. Someone with national reach and influence who can say, “Hold on, we tried that in the 1960s/70s and back in the reign of Ethelred the Unready. It didn’t work then, why would it work now?”

We have a national statistician, a national poet, a national medical officer, a national musician, a national scientist, so why not a …

And here is Syntagma’s Person of the Year 2008:

The National Historian.

It may be a blank space now, but it would make some difference if we had one in the future. But who should it be?

The post could be decided by a BBC TV series of shows: Strictly Historical. Votes would come in turn from a panel of eminent judges, a studio audience and, yes, you at home. The comperes would be Vince Cable and Michael Portillo.

In the absence of that this year, we have held our own competition here at Syntagma Towers.

Here are the results:

In second place, Niall Ferguson, whose TV programme, The Ascent of Money on Channel 4, performed some of the tasks of a National Historian by reminding us how the credit crunch came about, and of similar situations and outcomes in the past. It was a creditable perfomance.

The winner, with greater support among our studio audience, was Andrew Roberts, the conservative historian deemed necessary as a counterweight to the prevailing Marxist drift of the nation.

Although the contest was very close, with major voting irregularities, by common consent there was no dance-off.

Congratulations to Andrew on his shadowy victory as the future National Historian of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Syntagma Person of the Year in reality in 2009.

Note of caution: You may think the above piece is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I can assure you, we are deadly serious!

John Evans