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 Some of those principles are worth learning, but many are out of date.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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Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s new overgrown-schoolboy hairdo is much too Red Nose Day for inclusion in a serious political website — so I’m writing about it here.

When William Hague first adopted his Mekon cut, I remember thinking he must have lost his marbles along with his tresses. Do you recall his Neanderthal mane at 16? But, over the years, his egghead look has grown on us. At least it allows him to age gracefully.

By contrast, as Cleggie gets older, his haircut will become younger and younger. A bit like the picture of Dorian Gray.

I bet this dyed, bristly, birdsnest soupcon is redesigned before very much longer.

As a natural-born conservative, I’ve always been attracted to Edmund Burke’s idea of the “natural society” — one in which people find their own social levels according to ability and inclination, and are able to speak out freely as they wish.

It seems obvious to me that such an arrangement results in a generally contented population, and therefore a peaceable one.

The Labour government (1997-2009) has destroyed that homely consensus. Early on, it introduced a rigid system of Marxist equality legislation that imported alien doctrines and rigidities into Britain. All manner of inoffensive folk were inexplicably demonized, and often criminalized, for views and actions that would not have been remarked upon during centuries past.

Ideological correctness was the order constantly barked from above. An Orwellian State sprouted up where once civility and civilization stood. Society as a whole became disorganized and sullen, with serious outbreaks of violence on the streets, especially among the young of all classes. Alcoholism is now commonplace, as are hard drug habits, knife and gun crime.

All this recent misery and disorder can be traced back to obsessive social engineering by government ministers we wouldn’t trust to assemble a flat-pack whelk stall.

How we have lost our natural society, and what we can do to retrieve it, is a big topic for another day. For now, let’s speculate on what the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and Adler, would have made of New Labour Britain — in my own, surmised, words:

“Equality is a dangerous matter for politicians to touch. They have no idea what complex areas of the mind they are meddling with. Equality before God, the law and the ballot box is as far as a democratic society should go. Any further and it risks wholesale disturbance across the population.

“If people are forced to bottle up their natural instincts and inclinations, with no outlets of expression, they develop severe anxiety neuroses and tensions that will increasing boil over into social disorder. People who are discontented most of the time inevitably reach for the bottle and the needle to calm their inner turmoil.

“Enforcing equality of attributes is a minefield best left alone. It is also self-defeating because attributes are, by their very nature, unequally distributed across the human population. Every parent observes that fact in the personalities of their children, which are anything but equal, despite sharing a genetic makeup.

“Nothing, save losing a war on homeground, is as explosively destructive of civilized values than enforced equality of attributes. Karl Marx, like all socialists, never understood human nature. Look where that got him — he nearly destroyed the world.”

Something else for David Cameron’s Conservatives to get rid of then?

Have you tried Sainsbury’s sugar-free dark chocolate? I’m chewing on a lump now and it’s surprisingly good. In fact it tastes just like normal chocolate.

It’s supposed to be beneficial to the old ticker too. Something to do with antioxidants and all that.

Predictably, the killjoys were out in force this week rubbishing claims that the dark brown stuff is good for you. You’ll get fat, they shriek. Obesity is a fate worse than death. Stop before it’s too late!

It’s enough to give you a heart attack, isn’t it?

Why do the current crop of British politicians copy everyone else?

Whenever a new policy is suggested, the accompanying spin alerts us to the supposedly comforting fact that it’s been developed and tried out by Sweden/Australia/America … and other generous countries around the world.

Has the UK lost its ability to create policy ideas pertinent to its history and the specific aspirations of its people?

Let’s be frank, the Labour party is an ideas-free zone, it can no more identify the wider needs of Britons than it can manage the economy for any decent length of time.

Under its diktat, almost every part of the country has been reduced to pathetic shards of failure and dereliction. Observe Labour’s strongholds in Glasgow, where constant Labour local government has bequeathed the inhabitants a life-expectancy lower than sub-Saharan Africa.

Make no mistake, the task of the upcoming Tory Government will be like the Labours of Hercules.

As we gear up for a possible June election, all the old arguments about that hallowed stretch of real estate, the centre ground, are bubbling up again.

This sacred turf is said to be the only place from which a party can win a General Election. Both centre-left and centre-right positions deter a crucial constituency — Middle Britain.

Given that Gordon Brown has boxed himself in electorally by a strange combination of anger and timidity — classic traits of the bully — a June 2009 poll is overwhelmingly his least worst choice. Even Peter Mandelson apparently accepts that view. We must assume it’s a strong possibility.

Will Brown try to regain the centre ground for Labour from the artful Conservatives? And should the Tories attempt to defend it by circling the wagons?

My own view is that the so-called centre ground is a myth. Margaret Thatcher won three elections in a row. Her radical thinking became the norm, the consensual heart of British political discourse. Yet most voters saw her as distinctly right wing. How can that be explained?

What she occupied was not the boring old centre, but the High Centre Ground, that pinnacle from which the entire terrain is visible. As the old song has it: “On a clear day, you can see forever”.

This week, David Cameron’s apology for failing to spot the flaws in the runaway economy plonked him squarely in the High Centre of British politics.

You had your chance, Gordon. You blew it!

Again.

For months I’ve been putting up pieces in Syntagma exploring new policy initiatives for an incoming Conservative Government. (Note the capital G in the spelling; Labour always gets a derisory lower-case for its dismal performance.)

However, these snippets are distributed around the site unmarked and less coherently than they should be. So we’ve decided to start a new weekly feature column: Pointers to a Conservative Government on Tuesdays, in the run up to Dave’s misty-eyed entry into 10 Downing Street.

It will be a new dawn, will it not?

It will also be the beginning of a Trojan effort by the Party to rebuild a truly blasted heath of a country. It will take at least three Parliaments to achieve.

We’ve already covered education, manufacturing, public borrowing and public sector govenance, along with globalization and parts of foreign policy (see yesterday’s Saturday Ramble), but will now put them all under one roof for convenience.

I hope the views of a Burkean Democrat Minimalist Conservative (BDMC — a new species) may prompt an echoing response from within the Party’s leadership.

They will need all the help they can get.

John Evans

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The runaway inconsistencies of the Labour government’s handling of the economic crisis in Britain are truly terrifying.

Last week, they began printing money to buy back debt they themselves have issued, a process I described as like a snake eating its own tail.

Technically, this is considered a triumph of good judgement in the circumstances. Logically, it’s voodoo without a witch doctor.

Now, having added Lloyds HBoS to its list of (virtually) wholly owned banks, they are offering hugely expensive insurance policies against these bank’s toxic assets. As John Redwood writes in his blog today: “I asked what was the point of taxpayers ‘insuring themselves’ in RBS and Lloyds.”

The contradictions involved in eating one’s tail and insuring oneself against loss with one’s own resources are derangement-inducing. We could all go mad just thinking about them.

We’re told that economics is a funny business. Things are not always what they seem. The bad guys are often the goodies in disguise, and the reverse is also true. If you’re not a member of the Initiati, you must take it on trust. You have to see it in the round.

But when the snake gets to its stomach, what then? And if taxpayers have to pay out on dodgy loans — as much as £50 billion, some say — does that money go round in circles and end up back in taxpayers’ pockets?

Like hell it does! It will more than likely find its way into the bonus packages of jubilant bankers, or back in the Treasury where they will find some excuse for spending it on social programmes that fritter it away. That’s suspiciously handy with major elections in the offing.

This is high deception and makes a mockery of the idea that “our government” is actually on our side.

Many have also noted that these trillion pound operations have been undertaken without proper Parliamentary approval or scrutiny. Perfunctory best describes their response to curious MPs, like John Redwood.

In the handling of this crisis, as in other areas, they have become the enemy within.

John Evans

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The State of the Union

I’m not a practising economist, but I did read an economics course at university, along with psychology. Because of it, I’m probably slightly better equipped to understand what’s going on now than the average Jo(e).

The word “slightly” is important here because it means just what it says.

The difference between books on standard economics and what goes on at the windows in Central Banks is enormous, especially as the “windows” aren’t windows at all.

When you also take into account modern investment banks — what we used to call merchant banks when we British were British and not Americans — the difference becomes profounder still.

The business of moving money around has become so arcane and global that hardly anyone understands it now, not even bankers, and especially not politicians. This means we can either attempt to follow the bizarre mathematical models of Harvard MBAs and, if tales are to be believed, rocket scientists from NASA, or we fall back on practical psychology to make sense of it. That’s what I do.

This leads directly both to my successes in forecasting and my failures. Looking back I detect, from a low base of hands-on experience, that I’ve done about as well as the average expert commentator, and occasionally much better — Anatole Kaletsky leaps to mind.

How much will you pay for my method? Here it is free of charge:

Do not trust Gordon Brown to get anything right from the medium short-term going forward.

That is my Golden Rule. It produces tier upon tier of successful forecasting.

Distrust any proposal that would lower the democratic input into policy.

It’s not that democratic decisionmaking is necessarily superior to any other, just that non-democratic forces are often catastrophically wrong, and usually pernicious in their effects.

The more global they are, the less competent they become. This accords with the principles of Superdemocracy.

Beware those who persistently use the word “global”.

These strange beings fantasise themselves as rulers of the world. I’m convinced Gordon Brown dreams of those old Soviet posters of Lenin being carried into Moscow beneath a huge red flag. Archetypes of the Great Leader are never to be trusted or encouraged.

Does anyone know if Brown has Photoshop on his computer?

Stick with minimum, obvious solutions in economics.

Confronting someone in a car accident, with blood pouring from an artery, you wouldn’t offer them an iron tablet. Neither would you send for an aromatherapist, however fashionable. The poor chap needs the medical equivalent of Joe the Plumber to deal with a major overflow problem. Monetarists are financial plumbers, the emergency services.

Keynesians, and others who prefer not to bear any label, are the naturopaths of economics. They should only enter the arena to deal with delicate matters like balancing supply and demand and use deficit financing sparingly over a cycle. A scented candle here, a relaxing massage there.

Used sensitively, as they should, these arms of political economy can be made to produce a “cocktail of measures”, as Kenneth Clarke described it from the stage of the Ken and Eddie Show — an entertainment that is, alas, no longer with us.

Treat anything emanating from Brussels as you would a red-hot brick.

This is built on decades of experience and is not disputed by anyone who can see further than the end of their street. Unfortunately, that does not include most politicians.

Services run by the public sector cost twice as much in the end as private provision.

The old saying that a pound in your pocket loses half its value when it lands in the government’s bank account, probably underestimates the losses in Labour’s public sector. Many of these costs are disguised as something else, or appear off balance sheet.

View all opinions from international regulatory bodies as suspect.

This is the Holy Grail for us Democratic Minimalists. International and supranational sherpas are rootless individuals holding no philosophy other than seizing the agendas of national and local democratic forces, whom they regard as village idiots. Always stick with the idiots — at least you can understand them, and whip them when they’re wrong.

So there you have it. My methodology. If in future I get anything wrong, you will at least know I have the best of intentions and no ambitions to rule the world.

Are you listening, Gordon?

John Evans

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Gordon Brown’s new back-to-the-future idea is to introduce “old fashioned banking” again to the High Street. After all, banks lend out other people’s money, so should be careful where they put it.

He will “ban” 100 percent mortgages, make borrowers save up their deposits, and force them to meet “old fashioned” bank managers, who will get to know them like GPs did in the days of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. Ahh, the past is so reassuring, isn’t it?

But Chancellors of the Exchequer also spend and allocate other people’s money. Shouldn’t they be tightening up their rules of tax and spend in the vast public sector? And shouldn’t State benefits be handed out sparingly to those who truly need them? Isn’t it also imperative that no-one should be given a public job unless they are urgently needed on the front line and well qualified for the task?

Brown didn’t begin to address that problem. Bankers will be sent for re-education by Captain Mainwaring characters, but the good old “public realm” will just carry on as before, squandering other people’s money.

Isn’t this just another sneaky way of blaming the banks rather than himself?

Labour MP, Chris Mullin, in a new book* writes: “The trail leads back to Gordon — but if it all goes wrong he’ll be nowhere to be seen.”

* A View From The Foothills

Do you ever have “There is a God!” moments? I had one last week.

I was walking down a narrow pavement alongside a completely empty road, when the tinkling of a bicycle bell assailed my ears from behind. One of those aggressive two-wheel types was attempting to force me to stand aside on a pedestrian walkway.

I won’t go into how irritating these people are, fury is not a pleasant subject to write about. However, whatever allows these oiks to ride along pavements should be repealed by the next Conservative Government.

Naturally, I ignored him — it’s always a he. He rang the bell again. I sauntered on. Again he tried, before snorting and turning onto the road. As he passed he gave me a backward glance of total exasperation.

My returned stare must have unsettled him. He wobbled, desperately corrected his trajectory, hit the curb, and fell off.

I walked past with a beatific smile of satisfaction.

There is a God!

Like everyone else I’ve been trying to make sense of the causes of this world depression. I’ve pieced together bits that have appeared here over the past few months in the hope they make a coherent and plausible case for what went wrong.

In the beginning
1. In 1977, President Carter pushed through an Act forcing banks to give mortgages to sub-prime borrowers.
2. In 1999, President Clinton signed off the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from investment banking.
3. Clinton also encouraged the securitization of morgage debts into Collateralized Debt Obligations by Bears Stearns. Astonishingly, they were given Triple A investment status by the involvement of government-backed Freddie Mac. Thus, potentially toxic assets were bundled up and sold off to the world’s banking system.

Note: these are both Presidents of the left.

Reinforcing causes
Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long because he believed “downturns will happen and can be cleaned up afterwards”. Meanwhile, just enjoy the white-knuckle ride.

In the benign conditions created by Greenspan and his student Gordon “No more boom and bust” Brown, high leverage (debt) was seen as a one-way bet for financiers and private-equity outfits, some of dubious provenance.

A system of shadow banking was set up outside the regulatory framework which passed debt around between different institutions, hedge funds and capital markets, creating more money than the original debt. The normal effect of a burgeoning money supply is inflation, which eventually squeezes out any asset bubbles that form along the way.

However China simultaneously introduced a massive deflationary element into the mix. Trillions of dollars of very cheap goods poured out of the country to soak up the growing money mountains of the developed world.

The deflationary effect masked the inflation embedded in the Western economic boom, allowing it to last much longer than normal and storing up more problems as time passed.

On the ground, it seemed as if the good times would go on forever. A classic psychological contagion set in among politicians, financial markets and the ordinary public. No-one could lose was the signal, everyone was a winner, even the poorest with no income, no job and no assets.

The Endgame
When sub-prime borrowers in America started defaulting on their loans, as they were bound to at some point, bankers found it impossible to trace the indebtedness through the system because of the sliced and diced nature of the securities that now concealed them.

These assets were effectively worthless as they could not be valued. The whole planet was suddenly stripped of value. There were no hooks left to store capital and savings, except gold and flighty commodity markets. Meltdown time had arrived.

The growing realization that banks all over the world held these poisonous assets, effectively closed down the inter-bank lending markets. Banks no longer trusted any other not to fail and default on their loans. The Credit Crunch was born.

The rule of Up-To-A-Pointism suggests: “If something works, it only works up to a point. Thereafter it yields diminishing returns, followed by negative consequences. Government intervention is like that, as are free markets. Both have a limited bandwidth within which they operate well.”

Let us hope that the new financial system that emerges takes note of this simple rule.

Prediction
The world will now skate helter-skelter in the opposite direction. The pendulum of opinion will overshoot the mark and overregulate financial markets, thus breaching the Up-To-A-Pointism rule.

Something akin to a 1970s situation will be created as legislators try to close off all exits. The result will be a stifling, sealed commercial environment with few incentives for innovation and hard work.

It will take another “liberalization” package of measures a few decades down the line to set off another period of prosperity, leading to another bust.

Plus ca change …

I’ve just watched the seventh of eight episodes of Channel 4’s patchy series, Christianity. It was presented by Professor Colin Blakemore of Oxford University, a colleague of Richard Dawkins — author of The God Delusion — and a fellow believer in the new religion of Scientism.

So far, only three of the programmes have stood out: Howard Jacobson’s, Michael Portillo’s, and Rageh Omaar’s thoughtfully fair view of the relationship between the West’s religion and Islam.

As an Idealist in philosophical terms, I’ve not got a lot in common with Blakemore’s viewpoint, however, he put his case engagingly and intelligently.

One highlight for me was the comparison of a cathedral with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border. This chilling aggregation of metal, electric wiring and brutalist architecture seemed straight out of the Nazi manual of “How To Subdue Human Values By Gigantism and Intimidation”.

Next up: Cherie Blair. What are we to make of that?

Quote of the Week

This is rather a good description of New Labour philosophy:

“The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own.
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

John Evans

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Protectionism is not for us, says Gordon Brown in exclusive Davos yesterday. So too does Peter (Lord) Mandelson, who has his own vested interest.

Brown should realize that if a leader refuses to protect his own nation, he is by default giving comfort to the rest of the world.

The Prime Minister can only say that because he’s never been elected by the whole nation — nor even by the Labour party. He has no sense of obligation to a body of people to whom he owes his job. Worse, he probably despises the electorate, believing they will never elect him to the highest office in the land. He’s right on that one.

Stodgy bureaucrat and international socialist that he is, he views the entire world as his field of gold, the backdrop to his fame on a global stage. Britain is a minor matter in the calculation.

Nothing else explains his fixation on global structures at the expense of national ones, which are there just to be destroyed. His refusal to staunch the mad scamble of immigration that occurred on his watch for a decade, is a scar on the Labour party that it will not live down for a generation.

Even when Brown had the chance of a derogation on Eastern European migration, he brushed it aside. It would damage his reputation as a world statesman, and besides who cares about the workers whose jobs would be undercut? Not the master theorist with no experience of the real world.

This disconnect between Brown’s actual policies and the support his own countryfolk have cried out for, is not to be found in the lame rhetoric, “British jobs for British workers”, but runs through his actions like veins in a blue cheese.

We have a Prime Minister who doesn’t actually care much for the British and their concerns at all. Trappings of power and the airy-fairy “world coming together as one”, are the driving forces behind everything he does.

This leaves the electorate with a very serious subcrisis to add to the emerging economic and financial woes: a government that governs for anyone but them.

Prime Ministers are appointed to office on the basis that they command a majority in the House of Commons. In the case of Brown, he came to power in mid-Parliament — another fine mess left by Tony Blair — so lacks the nation’s backing for his Soviet-style political philosophy.

Until fairly recently (1997 to be precise) you could count on a PM having strong patriotic instincts that would put Britain first. It is the essence of the job, after all. Until next summer that assurance is missing. We are governed by someone who puts the rest of the world before our own interests.

Brown’s principal sidekick Peter Mandelson — a man attracted to power like a mosquito to blood — is so caught up in the European “project” that he can’t be relied upon to make any decision in the UK’s best interest. Less globalization than continentalization. But it comes to the same end.

It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous situation for the country. A Prime Minister and deputy acting for overseas “friends” rather than for our much depleted country.

Brown’s late countryman, novelist and historian John Buchan would have had blunt words to describe both of them, none ideologically-correct in Labour’s terms. Suffice it say that Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot would be on their trail like unforgiving tigers.

It’s time to put the country first. Globalization has failed spectacularly, especially in the Ponzi-scheme financial sector. It came up with idiot’s gold that blew away with the first whiff of cordite, leaving millions with lifelong indebtedness or facing default and bankruptcy.

Britain will not break out of this home-grown disaster until its principal authors are persuaded, or forced, to leave the scene. The party that demonizes others for a living should in turn be demonized by those who come after … in the long-term national interest.

Then what? Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

John Evans

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At Davos today, Gordon Brown warned that countries should not resort to protectionism to remove their economies from the global slump.

“This is a time not just for individual, national measures to deal with the global financial crisis. This is the time … for the world to come together as one.”

Heaven help us, he’s getting Messianic again. A classic case of fantasy working overtime.

Sanity from Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), who said that moves towards protectionism during a downturn were expected.

Reference: Sensible protectionism is not a sin

John Evans

The word “protectionism” is on almost everyone’s lips these days. It’s viewed as a bogey word, depicting the worst that could happen.

The fact is, it’s as inevitable as cold weather in winter. In some senses it’s also necessary.

When danger advances, creatures retract to safety. Think of crabs, snails, hedgehogs, wood lice … humans. The flight to safety, as financiers call it, is as natural as autumn rain. It will happen. It is already.

Globalization is fine in the good times. No-one turns away a good deal when there’s no risk, even if it arrives from a far-off country. When we perceive high risk to be involved, we withdraw to what, and whom, we know, in our own communities.

We can’t buck human psychology. We shouldn’t try. Only socialists do that. It wastes precious energy and resources.

The time has come to rebuild our home infrastructure and rethink the way we are governed. Anyone who believes that is not necessary should consider the mechanics of how we operate a variety of our affairs now: The State of the Union.

Latterday protectionism is happening over trade — think U.S. car subsidies — and also in financial markets. Foreign banks have all but pulled out of Britain, leaving massive holes in our ability to borrow commercially and domestically. That is a major part of the problem we face.

Did anyone in the UK with a Post Office savings account know their money was held by the Bank of Ireland? They do now!

We may be lucky that the situation is “only” as rotten as in 1931, especially as 1933 was when the really bad things began — like Major (later General) Patton leading a sabre charge of the U.S. Cavalry against 25,000 starving war veterans in Washington DC. That sort of thing couldn’t occur now, could it? Don’t count on it.

The fact is we’re set on a trajectory that will bring us close to a 1933 scenario. Let’s do ourselves a favour and accept that. We can then set about putting our individual houses in order by retracting to what matters here and now. When the time arrives, we will be prepared for the economic winter to come.

Bleating on about “global solutions” that are never solutions, even in the good times, but merely sticking plaster pretences to save face, is about as counter-productive as it gets.

This is not pessimism, it’s an acceptance of human psychology and having the guts to face up to it. If the worst catches us by surprise, we have only ourselves to blame.

Britain as a nation has always faced the tempests bravely, with fortitude, stoicism and humour. Our leaders need to start preparing the country for a prolonged period of acute discomfort. When we know the worst, the best in us will emerge.

The good news is that when we hit rock bottom, the only option is to rebound.

But will we have rebuilt our public domain by then, so that we can be first onto those bright sunlit uplands?

John Evans

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The madness of King George has long resonated in the memory of the British people, largely because it is falsely associated with the loss of the American colonies, assets we could do with right now.

At the start of 2009, the madness of Gordon Brown is beginning to replace the porphyria of our mainly benign 18th-century Monarch.

I don’t need to rehearse what’s been said here for more than a year. Regular readers will have sensed long ago a profound disillusionment with our monumentally out-of-his-depth Prime Minister. Within the last week the mood has changed radically, and in a darker direction.

An edge of desperation and despair is spreading through the public prints, the online world, and people wandering aimlessly through our increasingly derelict high streets. You can feel a blistering of attitudes and settled judgements.

The sense of everything going wrong at once is neatly encapsulated by the American professor, Robert Reich, who said that current policy is “socialism for rich bankers and capitalism for everyone else”.

There’s also deep anger, an anger that could spill over into the streets sooner than we think. In a stunning blog post, SERIOUSLY ALARMED, Britain’s most accurate financial journalist on this crisis, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nails the baby boomer generation, and by implication Gordon Brown and the government, as “blithering idiots”.

The end will come suddenly, like pulling on a brick with a rubber band. Nothing happens at first, then the brick leaps up and hits you in the face.

That moment is close.

It’s getting serious now. The last time England defaulted on its debt was under “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell, a role model for New Labour.

Gordon Brown must resign or call a general election. Nothing less will do.

His presence has become an insult to the nation.

John Evans

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