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

Recent Related Stories
Saturday Ramble: Obscure authors – Garstin and Val Baker
Saturday Ramble: The inalienable lightness of darkness
Saturday Ramble: A political class whose heart is not in these islands
Saturday Ramble: What is Christianity?

I’ve just watched David Cameron deliver another accomplished speech at the Conservatives’ Spring Conference at Cheltenham.

Gradually — a word also used by George Osborne this morning — he’s beginning to give shape to the message that will take him into the General Election.

“Thrift” loomed large, while “tax and spend” becomes the natural enemy. Sensibly, he didn’t put too much skin on the flesh and bones. Things could take many turns for the worse before election day arrives, however soon it comes.

The speech was a good mix and plays well with the mood of the times, especially after last week’s atrocious Labour Budget. It sounded pitch perfect to me, as far as it went.

I would have liked to hear something about an association agreement with the European Union, but recognize the constraints he’s under. Maybe a little dog whistle in code to us genuine Conservatives would do the trick?

Here’s my suggestion. In his next speech or TV interview Cameron could mention former French President Giscard d’Estaing by name, in any context, and we will get the message.

I’ll be listening out intently.

The following is my contribution to the debate on the standards adopted by our Members of Parliament.

As an author I sometimes despair of publishers. And yet, as a former book publisher, I know the problems publishers face. So I’m posting this little cri de coeur I found on the web.

It’s written by a publisher, obviously, who shall remain anonymous, largely because I’ve lost the reference. But it does provide some insight into the always tortuous relationship between author and publisher:

Authors really don’t like publishers. They don’t like us because we change their work, or force them to. We reject their titles. We dress their books in jackets they hate.

We take custody of their manuscripts and refuse visitation rights. We don’t let them see or comment on marketing plans. We spend very little money or time promoting their books.

Our royalty statements might as well be in Aramaic. We don’t return their voicemail or email. We don’t communicate and we don’t care.

Sure, that’s an over-generalization, but it’s too close to the truth for comfort. It should concern us that so many authors feel this way about their publishers. And it’s our fault, really, for not communicating better about exactly what we do, and why.

Why can’t our MPs demonstrate such exquisite self-knowledge?

Continuing with the ever present thorn in the public foot of MP’s expenses, something glaringly obvious (to me, at least) has been missed by many.

MPs on the left of politics spend a lot of energy denouncing “fat cats” in industry and commerce, as well as the City of London, for their huge paypackets. Consequently, they have induced a phobia about putting up their own salaries to appropriate levels.

A kind of Freemasons’ nod and winkery has been covertly put in place across party lines to use the expenses system to compensate them for what they regard as inadequate remuneration.

Such a system encourages corruption because it is fundamentally corrupt to conceal and disguise payments received — of any sort.

Thus most MPs cross the line between fair reward and brown envelope practices. The system itself is corrupt, therefore those who take part are corrupted.

As Iain Martin writes in today’s Sunday Telegraph, the answer lies in Members’ own hands — they are meant to be sovereign, after all.

How can they hold the Executive to account, when Chief Whips know everything about the jiggerypokery going on all around them? Francis Urquhart would have had a field day. “I know about that bathplug, Jacqui.”

Pay them £100k and be done with it. After all, if a 5-a-day officer at Warminster-on-Sea Parish Council gets that, why not our legislators?

Oh, I forgot. They aren’t our legislators any more, are they? Brussels has taken that prize.

Okay, promise them £150k if they pull us out of the EU. That should get things moving, don’t you think?

Down here in the South West of England we have three football teams: Exeter (the Grecians), Torquay (the Gulls), and Plymouth (the Pilgrims).

Mostly they languish towards the bottom of the Football League, which I believe has four divisions.

Usually one of them manages bottom spot in the fourth division, before disappearing, through relegation, into a bottomless pit of poverty and amateurism.

However, our local supporters are rarely downcast, taking it all in their stride as an Act of God. One cheery soul told me how he deals with the constant stench of defeat.

“Easy,” he said. “When you get your football paper at the weekend, turn it upside down before looking at the tables. My team is usually top of the whole football league.”

Is that a glimpse of Gordon Brown’s political philosophy?

Remember the “world car”?

It could be a Ford, a Range Rover, or a Chrysler, but its parts were made all over the world, from Brazil to China, before being assembled into its final incarnation, when someone would stick a badge on it proclaiming its proud provenance.

This was globalization in the raw. A ruthless, yet profitable, use of comparative advantage to drive the costs of motoring down — however carboniferous the footprint as all those parts criss-crossed the globe on smelly bits of shipping.

Then the socialist left — devoid of purpose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s flight to capitalism — spotted a gap in the market. The old International Socialist movement, now describing itself as “Progressive Internationalism”, subverted the word “globalization” to describe its own activities.

Many normally astute commentators fell for this subterfuge and eagerly jumped on the global bandwagon, little knowing that it is, in reality, their worst nightmare.

Syntagma has been one of the few voices to proclaim this dirty trick from the rooftops.

Listen very carefully, I will say this only once: Globalization has ceased to be a technical term of economics and is now a pernicious political doctrine of the old left hiding under a thin veil of modernity.

Anyone using the word “global” more that once a year should be sacked immediately from high office.

Finally, on the new 50p tax rate for anyone earning more than £150k a year:

Both David Cameron and George Osborne said today they will put it on a list of taxes to repeal, but priority will be given to National Insurance increases for people earning just £20k and more.

Fair enough, but given the rate of attrition 50p will cause (see Nigel Lawson’s piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph), perhaps they could turn the list upside-down when deciding which tax to drop first.

Some of the best people do this, I’m told.

PS: I shall be listening out for a Cameroon mention of the secret codeword: Giscard d’Estaing, over the coming week. PMQs would do very nicely.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Tory lead, Cambridge connection, Vince Cable, Royal Academy, West Wing Hazel, Queen and Duke
DIARY: Water droplets, Dirty tricks, David Starkey, Liddle’s Lent, Carbon storage
DIARY: Editors at large, Easter, Hoffman, Andrew Neil, Iain Dale, Autumn election
DIARY: Wishful spending, He has bottom, Brown’s fall, Combustion stinks, One world

We are going through a period of profound transition — from one party in power to another, and from boom to long-term bust. The signs are all around us.

When I first moved to Devon, pedestrian signposts had the patina of age and gave distances in yards and fractions of a mile.

Then Labour came in and the posts were changed to metric ones. These were very unpopular and many were defaced or painted over — we have a UKIP MEP down here, Trevor Coleman. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him.

Today, I noticed that all the signposts have been changed yet again. Miserably, the yardage is still absent, but at least the Napoleonic metres have gone.

In the Exeter area we now measure distances between sites of interest and public conveniences in minutes.

Yes, some Council plodder has been trudging around the City and environs with stopwatch and pencil recording how long it takes to walk from point to point. The job was probably advertised in The Guardian at £100k a year.

I’ll leave you to imagine what comes next. Brussels will surely not take this lying down.

I’ve been waiting for years for a new EU system for measuring time. Euroheures, perhaps.

I watched Lord (Adair) Turner on the Andrew Marr show this morning with incredulity.

He’s a clever chap, no doubt, and he’s had more Government jobs than you can shake a pile of sticks at. In his new dual role as Financial Services chief and compiler of future rules on bank surveillance, he demands to be heard.

So I was both amused and bemused by his implacable and persistent defence of the status quo in banking regulation.

A new Glass-Steagull Act? No, there are occasions when crossovers between retail and investment banking are inevitable. And Lehmans was not a deposit-taker, yet still crashed the system.

Strict limits on capital adequacy? We should be careful because smaller banks will not be big enough to support the economy.

Tighter regulation all round? We’re not facing a repeat of present circumstances for decades, so let’s lob that into the long grass for the foreseeable future.

He is, though, recommending a huge expansion of the FSA and its responsibilities. Presumably that means ratcheting up its present cost of £350m annually closer to a round billion.

Even when reducing its caseload, the public sector seeks to expand its budget.

A blast from the past is never far away in our 24-hour media.

Last week the name of Ayn Rand appeared again in the public prints under the distinguished byline of Gladstonite flag-bearer, Simon Heffer. Ye Gods, I had completely blanked this lady out from memory.

I first read her most famous tome Atlas Shrugged in the late 1980s when Thatcherism was the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, in the City of London where I then worked.

I have to confess, I was underimpressed by the book. Apart from being an immensely long novel about the endeavours of capitalist heroes and their socialist enemies in Depression era America, it was stupifyingly boring.

It also seemed to me to be almost identical in reverse to the Stalinist artworks about the endeavours of socialist heroes in the Soviet Union, where the Depression never ended.

The book is full of cardboard characters, with people representing notions rather than anyone you might know. A lesser version of a Shaw play without the wit and humour.

Interestingly, Rand grew up under Stalin before escaping to America, so understood what Communism was like at first hand. Even allowing for that, her advocacy of capitalism red in tooth and claw, operating like a vast machine, visible across every landscape, was too similar to Stalin’s murderous industrialization policies for my taste. Both philosophies shared the same inhuman and ultimately self-defeating qualities.

As we could be entering Great Depression 2.0, it should have some resonance today. I’m sure the basic idea is sound. Free individuals, subject to creative destruction, allocate scarce resources better than booby bureaucrats, as we know all too well.

But there’s something missing. It’s called Up-To-A-Pointism, and in present circumstances we would do well to remember it.

Rand’s Objectivism would lead us all the way back to where we now find ourselves.

Much fuss over the new, proposed 45 percent tax rate for £150k+ earners. As some commentators have said, it could be another of Gordon Brown’s less than subtle traps of the “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” variety, opening the way to the charge of “Tory cuts!”.

In defensive response, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne signalled that he may not be able to avoid retaining it once in power, given the state of the economy. It may have been more profitable to avoid the subject.

It has to be said, George Osborne attracts a great deal of antipathy from individuals on his own side. There are those of a Tory persuasion who would flay him alive if they thought they could get away with it.

So far, the leadership has adopted the sensible strategy not to give too much away before the election, which could be as late as June next year. History relates that Margaret Thatcher did much the same in 1979.

But how should David Cameron address Brown’s inevitable taunt of “Tory cuts”?

With real anger. He should turn it back on Brown, branding them “Brown’s Cuts”. As Chancellor, he ran the prosperity-creating parts of the economy ruthlessly into the ground to fund his bloated public domain.

Cameron should repeat the phrase at every possible opportunity to dull the edge of Brown’s claymore in the campaign proper. A taste of his own poison will throw Brown into confusion and drill the message into voters’ heads.

As Corporal Jones used to say, “They don’t like it up ‘em”.

Mr “Green”, Jonathon Porritt, adviser to Prince Charles and Gordon Brown, wants Britain’s population reduced to 30 million. At present it stands at 61m and is expected to rise to 71m in 20 years.

What exactly are we supposed to do with the excess 40m people? Should we drop them into shark-infested waters? Ship them through the channel tunnel and dump them in France? Maybe have regular culls like the Canadians do with baby seals?

How do we know we ourselves won’t be included in the list?

One thing’s for sure, no one will mention that the recent immigrant population is having children at a much faster rate than the natives.

Where was Porritt when Labour’s open-door stealth immigration policy was foisted on a reluctant Britain?

H.G. Wells thought that the optimum world population was two billion. What would he make of the 7bn sardines now living on the planet?

One can’t help thinking that Jonathon Porritt would be regarded as one of humanity’s worst ogres if ever he gets round to formulating a policy to carry out his new, big idea.

Prince Charles should gently guide his old friend to the nearest rest home for oddballs and nutters.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Clegg, Burke, Chocolate, Labour copycats, High centre ground, Pointers
DIARY: Kennedy, Mandelson, Public sector, Prince of Wales, Birdtweets, Canadian meltdown
DIARY: Maitlis, Tories, Spring offensive, Education, Hendry, Eurozone
DIARY: Captain Mainwaring, God and bicycles, Psychological contagion, Prediction, Blakemore, Gilbert
DIARY: Tax evasion, Derivatives, Oborne, Randall, Great Depression 2.0, Political awards, O’Rourke

So the International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes we are in a “Great Recession”. What a soggy fag-end of a phrase, like a Great Mouse or a Great Flea.

The venerable Dominique Strauss-Kahn can’t bring himself to use the D word, so invents an intermediate superlative — a meaningless contradiction.

If it’s bigger than a recession, it’s a depression. If it’s deeper or longer than a depression, it’s a Great Depression. If it’s bigger than that, it’s Armageddon. Since that’s the end of the world, it would be overdoing it to imagine a Great Armageddon — but no doubt the IMF has that pencilled in for a rainy day too.

All this brings me to the question: why do we put up with these flabby, interfering international institutions? They’re expensive to run, limit the freedom of nation States, and have the aroma of 1944 hanging over them. Foyle’s War without Michael Kitchen.

Unusually, Karl Marx was dead right about globalization. He foresaw the pitfalls, recognizing the open door to empires — statist and commercial — on the back of spurious political unity.

The British East India Company was the prototype. When it failed, the authorities picked it up, mangled the good bits, and created imperialism from the wreckage. In its day, the Empire gave more than it took, but can we imagine it now?

Today, the big supranational institutions, many created at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, have a watching brief over the planet. As we have recently come to realize, they are not doing a good job.

So what if Britain resigned from all of these bureaucratic behemoths, dealing with each situation on an ad hoc, case by case basis?

I can hear the cries of indignation already from people who go with the flow for a living. A study conducted at the Harvard Business School reported that a third of students defined right and wrong in terms of what others were doing. The professor who compiled it said, “They can’t really step back and take a critical view. They’re totally defined by others.”

Let’s consider this question with an open mind then.

Would Britain lose status? What status? The Labour government has surely destroyed all respect for the country worldwide. Even the Americans seem ambivalent about us these days.

Resigning our seat on the Security Council, and our place in the General Assembly of the United Nations, would release us from the spider’s web of socialized command and control exercised by “the international community” — a phantom beast that leaves us to pick up the tab, while others ignore the precepts.

Goodbye UNHCR (a factor in the UK’s massive immigration problem), UNESCO, UNICEF, and all other spin-offs that allow totalitarian regimes to lecture us on law and the raising of children. These global quangos reduce us to slaves in our own country.

The G8, G20 and the soon-to-be upon us G200, would not be missed either.

NATO could go too. It’s responsible for the British Army’s underfunded and unsupported agony in Afghanistan. If the Europeans won’t fulfil their obligations, why should we?

Ditching the World Trade Organization (WTO) which, if it were a nation, would be designated a failed State, would place the onus back on us to produce the goods and services others want to buy — genuine free trade.

The IMF and OECD could also be dispensed with, joining European “human” rights conventions and other busybody groupings that have destroyed our once fine legal system.

And finally, the European Union, heir to Louis IV, Bonaparte and Hitler in its zeal to bring all of Europe under its hegemony. A simple trade agreement is all the UK needs.

The result would be a short period of confusion as our over-remunerated and feather-bedded MPs, and faux lordlings, came to terms with actually running the country, not pretending to be in charge of a mock legislature.

The focus of govenance would be transformed. The Houses of Parliament would receive back the 80 percent of legislation idly handed on a plate to Brussels. Changes for the better would be enormous. Voters would vote again, ensuring the best people were elected to the House that really mattered.

It wouldn’t be paradise or utopia, certainly, but not the current dystopia either. It would save desperately needed money, even if the Security Council seat were regarded as too important to lose.

For too long Britain has followed the rest into a glum international socialist arena dominated by the bogus “human” rights agenda.

Britain did lead the world once, why not again?

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Let’s be frank Frankia is not for the English
Localism and the Gordon Brown settlement
The State of the Union
Globalization destroys necessary bulkheads

I groaned audibly when David Cameron challenged Gordon Brown in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) today.

Cameron fell plop into an elephant trap when he complained about Brown’s dishonest phrase, “British jobs for British workers”. Brown simply retorted, “Who is not in favour of British jobs for British workers?”

Elementary, my dear Cameron. In fact, Nick Robinson warned this might happen on The Daily Politics a few minutes before.

The challenging of that simple slogan placed the Opposition Leader in Peter Mandelson’s lap, just as John Major was once depicted as a ventriloquist’s dummy perched on the knees of an enormous Helmut Kohl. Oh, dear!

No doubt Brown was cynically lying when he said it, but the point is a valid one, especially in dangerous times like these. Cameron should have given the impression he is on the workers’ side, if for no other reason than it was the skilled workers who supported the Tories under Margaret Thatcher.

So, is Cameron endorsing EU law and court judgements that effectively allow discrimination against qualified British workers in their own backyard? Shouldn’t he be creating merry hell against this outrage?

Apparently not.

I was determined to keep a little distance from Simon Heffer’s piece in today’s Telegraph, but Cameron’s performance took down the barriers.

Syntagma will punish the Tory Leader by voting UKIP in the European elections in June.

We will, of course, vote Conservative in the General Election, but with the fervent prayer (if it’s not illegal now) that he changes his tune when in Number 10.

Dear oh dear.

John Evans

Just a few weeks ago the world was wondering if we were about to be pitched into a deadly Black Hole created by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Relax. The machine has broken down and will not be cranked up again until the spring.

Strange then that another Black Abyss stretches before us today in the shape of a virulent debt deflation of almost unimaginable ferocity.

Take these words by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in today’s UK Telegraph:

We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.

In case you think that smacks of hysteria, this is a man who has called this crisis correctly ever since the late summer of 2007. He adds:

“During the past week, we have tipped over the edge, into the middle of the abyss. Systemic collapse is in full train. … Central bankers still paralysed by a misplaced fear of inflation – whether in Europe, Britain, or the US – have become a public menace and should be held to severe account by our democracies. The imminent and massive danger is now self-feeding debt deflation.”

What this crisis shows is that world prosperity was built on a giant illusion: that there was real value in other people’s promises to pay at some future date, and that you could pass the parcel at a vast profit.

Time has run out and a bubble the size of an asteroid has landed and exploded in the centre of our civilization — the banking system.

The Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett agrees, “In my adult lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people as fearful.”

Evans-Pritchard is lacerating about the EU and its Central Bank. It offered no “cover” to the Fed when Ben Bernanke slashed rates to 2 percent. The ECB simply raised its rate to 4.25 percent into a steep downturn, making oil inflation even worse.

As a last resort, it seems, the American authorities will use Bernanke’s famous printing press “to expand the menu of assets that it buys.” In the worst case, that could lead to a massive run on the dollar by foreign creditors and no end of misery for us all. But it may be necessary nonetheless.

At home, I have absolutely no confidence in the British government under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They have been woefully slow to act, their policy to hide their heads under a pillow hoping it will all go away.

If Brown had even a small slice of a leader’s courage he would put together a massive package to recapitalize the British banking system; disown the “mark-to-market” accounting agreement, which forces banks into insolvency by estimating their assets on depressed valuations; take immediate control of interest rates by reducing them to 2 percent; begin to prepare for withdrawal from the useless European Union; and work closely with the Americans, who are, at the very least, fully aware of the immense dangers we face.

The Kraken is awake and bearing down on us fast. Over coming months and years we may wish that the Hadron Collider had swallowed us all up when it had the chance.

Update: The British Government has announced a variety of measures to recapitalize the banks and get the inter-bank lending markets working again. It amounts to a $900 billion bailout, eerily identical to the Paulson Plan for a country five times the size of Britain.

John Evans

Related Stories
Depression looms like a yawning abyss
The Great Harvard Sausage Scandal 2008
Globalization destroys necessary bulkheads
Insurers crumble as financial structures fail
Hard times or better times?

In the days of sail, when ships were built of wood and were vulnerable to hostile warships and pirates, each ship had many bulkheads to isolate parts of it that were hit.

In the later days of giant ocean liners made of iron, wealthy passengers demanded large ballrooms and restaurants so the bulkheads disappeared from the upper decks. One of the first of these new vessels was the Titanic. It hit an iceberg and the rest needs no retelling.

We’re having our own Titanic moment now in the world’s financial system, where the bulkheads that protected us have mostly been removed. In the 1930s, America had the Great Depression, but Britain was comparatively unscathed. In 2008 we share the pain.

As David Brooks puts it in the New York Times, “We’re living in an age when a vast excess of capital sloshes around the world fueling cycles of bubble and bust. When the capital floods into a sector or economy, it washes away sober business practices, and habits of discipline and self-denial. Then the money managers panic and it sloshes out, punishing the just and unjust alike.”

Francis Fukuyama points out that globalization masks the flaws in economic policy. “Foreigners seemed endlessly willing to hold U.S. dollars, allowing the U.S. Government to run deficits and enjoy high growth. That’s why early on Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush that the lesson of the 1980s was that ‘deficits don’t matter’.”

Globalization is not new. The 250-year British Empire was a globalized trading system, depending on the might of the British Royal Navy — which had 50 percent of the world’s warships and most of its merchant fleet. It had the muscle and authority to protect its own national interests. That has been lost in modern times.

Transnational private-equity capital, almost all of it borrowed, has swept in and bought up most of our major corporations — on both sides of the Atlantic. These highly-leveraged buyouts seem benign in times of rampant expansion. However, it only takes a small twitch in the markets for the dust-thin financial structures to become sickly.

That also applies to banks that have followed suit and lent much more than their capital should allow. When the assets on their books are impossible to value because of the extent of toxic debt, the game is over.

The biggest question we will have to answer once the financial system has been stabilized, and the toxins isolated like nuclear waste, is: how much should we retract from globalization? In the age of the internet, is that even possible or desirable?

Even in regional terms, there’s no doubt that Britain’s membership of the European Union has degraded the country’s ability to be itself — a quality that has always paid off in the past.

On the other hand, staying out of the euro currency has shielded us from lower interest rates than we needed during the boom times. It also leaves us free to set optimum rates instead of relying on blunt fiscal instruments as the Irish, Spanish and Italians are having to do. This is one bulkhead that has more than proved its worth.

The EU’s decision to adopt the accounting standard of “fair value” or “mark to market” is having a devastating effect on our banks, whose diminishing capital is daily undervalued by the system, especially in hard times. The standard is as toxic as American mortgage securities.

While the U.S. is planning to ditch it, the EU’s directives will take years to repeal, and would need 27 countries to agree to it. Britain, should, as a matter of urgency scrap Brussels’s hold over our financial markets.

On some estimates, 84 percent of British laws are now made in Brussels. Most of them are counter-productive in a British context, obsessively bureaucratic, prescriptively inefficient and despised by the population. This heedlessly dispensed-with bulkhead is deeply desired and its absence bitterly resented. We should restore it as a matter of urgency.

I suspect that globalization has passed its peak. Without descending into full-blown protectionism, most nations will consider rebuilding some of the bulkheads that gave them their national characteristics, while minimizing restrictions on free trade. With tariffs low across much of the world, there is no need for global institutions to gum up the works with legalistic complexity.

Much of globalization is unnecessary and faddish, urged on us by old international Marxists and student Trotskyists like Gordon Brown and New Labour. They should be rejected.

America too should beware of whom it is electing to office in November.

It’s time to return to simplicity, fleetness of foot, and self-reliance. We would be much better nations if we did. And happier too.

John Evans

Related Stories
Depression looms like a yawning abyss
The Great Harvard Sausage Scandal 2008
Silicon Valley and the credit crunch
Insurers crumble as financial structures fail

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote a poem in support of a peasant’s revolt. When he presented it to the leaders of the uprising, they told him, “Our people won’t like this. Can’t you change it?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the poem,” retorted Brecht, “Change your people”.

Old Bertie would have made a fine President of the EU Commission in Brussels, for that comes very close to the European elite’s reaction to Ireland’s No vote in yesterday’s referendum on the proposed EU constitution.

Quick Recap for the Uninitiated
The original European Union constitution was rejected two years ago in referendums by the French and the Dutch. Had Britain been allowed the promised vote, it would have been slaughtered, but the No results on the continent saved Tony Blair’s face.

The bureaucrats of Brussels, urged on by Blair and Germany, then shuffled the pack, cut out a few cosmetic bits and renamed the document the European Reform Treaty. This is now in process of ratification around Europe. Only Ireland was given a referendum on it. Britain’s treacherous government under Gordon Brown defaulted on its manifesto promise and is currently forcing the treaty through Parliament to bypass the inevitable verdict of the people.

Yesterday, the Irish said No! … emphatically.
/Recap

This morning the EU is urging the other 26 countries to continue with their own treaty ratification processes, even though it requires unanimity to become law.

The simple fact is, Europe’s political class wants this “constitution” — so-called because it gives the EU a legal identity for the first time — while the people do not.

There are half a billion people against half a thousand politicians. Who will win?

The Commission’s legal team is already working on how to implement most of the constitution’s contents without the need for a treaty. In other words, smuggling most of it into law by the back door.

Why does Britain, the most Eurosceptic nation in Europe, put up with this ghastly authoritarianism? For the same reason we sleepwalked into two world wars in the last century. We preferred not to think about it until it became inevitable.

Sometimes apathy can kill.

A man turns up at a small hotel for a night’s stay. He speaks urgently to the landlady and says he’s allergic to apples. “Please don’t serve me apples,” he asks.

“I promise you’ll get no apples here,” she replies.

That evening the man is tucking into dessert which is described as fruit pie. To his horror he suddenly feels very ill.

“You promised me no apples,” he cries out to the landlady.

“It’s not apples,” she says, as his head doubles in size, his lips turn blue and he goes into acute anaphylactic shock. “It’s apple pie.”

Now consider the ongoing saga of the European Constitution — newly renamed an “Amending Treaty” despite being 98 percent the same as the constitution. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a manifesto promise that the British people would get a referendum on it. He has reneged on that promise because he knows he would lose by a very big margin.

The promise referred to a constitution, he says, and the treaty is no longer a constitution.

The original document has been shuffled around a bit, as you would a deck of cards, some cosmetic stuff has been removed, and the name changed.

It’s not a constitution, claims Brown. Sure, it’s constitution pie.