If you peep behind the curtains of your favourite daily newspaper, you’ll come across an interesting phenomenon. Many of them now have an Editor at Large.

From memory, there’s Jeff Randall at the Telegraph, Anatole Kaletsky at The Times, and even Country Life has one, its former editor, Clive Aslet.

What exactly do they do? The one distinguishing feature seems to be that they write fewer articles than hitherto. Smaller role, bigger title. Sooo 21st century.

Maybe they’re out roaming the countryside, hence “at large”. I can understand the Country Life chap doing that, but Jeff Randall? He’s roaming about the studios of Sky News — hardly “at large” is it?

It was always dangerous criminals who were “at large”, never, to my recollection, newspaper editors.

“Here is the news. Mad Frankie Grimethorpe, the multiple axe murderer, is still at large on Dartmoor. The public is urged to use great caution when approaching him.”

Is there something we should be told about our current crop of editors?

Just a week to Easter, my favourite time of year. It is positively springlike here in Devon, as if Rachel Carson never existed.

The G20 is over, Parliament is taking its hols — like birch pollen it comes earlier every year — and the Budget is three weeks away. We have a politics-free zone for almost a month.

I don’t know about you, but I’m politicked out. Would it be too much to ask the press barons to ban politics from the public prints for this brief interlude?

Maybe editors and hacks could go walkabout?

Or “at large” as we media folk put it.

Lord Hoffman, the retiring Law Lord, has stood up for British justice at last by roundly condemning the so-called European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

It is, he says, accruing to itself the role of Supreme Court of a fictional United States of Europe.

The court is made up of dozens of highly paid “judges” from countries like Bulgaria, Russia and Romania, which have almost no rule of law themselves. These upstart briefs consider it a good day’s work to overrule the democratically passed laws of ancient States like Britain.

Hoffman has left it a bit late in the day to make this critique. Many of us have been saying it for years.

The Sunday Telegraph is urging the Conservatives to pull Britain out of the Convention altogether and leave the interpretation of these things to British judges. So they should.

They should also repeal the Blairs’ Human Rights Act which has shredded the Common Law and made a mockery of justice in this country.

British laws for British people would be a good Tory rallying cry.

And while they’re at it, they could also scrap the European Extradition Warrant and the one-sided arrangement with America, whereby they can remove people from Britain without due process, but we can’t from the U.S.

It’s time our politicians remembered what their backbones are for, and stood up for the people of these islands.

Hard to get away from politics isn’t it?

Here’s more: Andrew Neil is retiring soon from a top slot at the BBC.

Over the years he has been a sturdy, even bullish, commentator on many aspects of politics, business and the media — he was once editor of The Sunday Times, and a joint owner (and editor) of The Scotsman.

Apart from The Daily Politics, in which he gives a commendable impression of Terry Wogan, and his Thursday night This Week show, which is on so late nobody watches it, he chairs the sombre News Channel show Straight Talk on Saturday nights.

And sombre is the word. The set is pitch black, the music funereal, the guests so old they look like waxworks. If you haven’t seen it, think Anthony Howard reminiscing on Harold Wilson and you know it by heart.

I’ve got a few ideas for a spruce up.

Change the set to white, play in with Amarillo by Tony Christie, set an upper age limit of 45 on the guests, and insist they still have an active role in politics. Bar all mention of Clement Attlee and Roy Hattersley — in fact, ban him too — and invite guests more like Michael Gove and David Miliband (with banana). Vince Cable could only appear if he does a twirl around the studio as an encore.

Maybe Andrew would have to retire early too, although his version of Amarillo on This Week is fondly remembered by many.

Iain Dale had a poll on his blog asking readers whether Britain should be a member of a future United States of Europe, or become the 51st State of the USA.

Apart from the fact that Washington has never offered an invitation to join it, while Brussels thinks it owns us already, this is not as simple a choice as it seems.

Putting aside the feasibilities of the matter, either option would obliterate British history and sovereignty and reduce the country to a subsidiary Hong Kong status.

Given only the two choices in the poll, America won hands down, 81 percent to 19.

However, if we lose sight of reality, we are truly lost. Just half a century ago Britain ran a worldwide empire bigger than any before or since. It provided the world’s language, its mercantile system, and the model of liberal democracy that dominates the planet even now.

It created the industrial revolution, and showed how a nation could live with its past and be modern, without a political revolution.

To throw in the towel because of the travails of the moment would be going against the grain of the national character.

Three words sum up the cause of Britain’s fall from grace: the Labour party.

Every time this bunch of political pygmies gets into power, the United Kingdom drops down the league of world nations. The Conservatives usually manage to haul it up a few notches, but never completely.

There is a progressive backlog of slippage which increases with every Labour occupancy of Whitehall.

If they win the next election, we may have to settle for membership of the Russian Federation, with Vladamir Putin settled in Buckingham Palace.

David Cameron, your time has come.

The timing of the General Election is on the minds of many pundits in the aftermath of the G20 summit and in the light of an upcoming penny-pinching Budget.

Peter Oborne has pulled back from his tentative suggestion that June, 2009 is a strong possibility, and I agree with him.

With so many elections being held, for local councils and the European “parliament”, the turnout will probably be small. The electorate seems sure to give Labour a trouncing in the locals, so it’s hard to see a different verdict in a Westminster poll.

Brown has few options save playing for a hung Parliament and a deal with the Lib Dems. Risking another winter of growing unemployment and worsening public finances, would be suicidal.

Syntagma’s finely-tuned antenna is screaming “autumn, autumn!” It has to be, hasn’t it? I simply can’t see beyond October. Whatever the position is then, it will just get worse next year.

Brown has to hope for a golden, hot summer, and a mellow public mood.

He will lose, without doubt. There is a shabbiness beyond redemption about his administration that can’t be denied or swept under the carpet.

John Evans

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Foreign Secretary David Miliband was on the Andrew Marr programme this morning and in subdued mood. The only memorable thing I recall is: “We have to inject demand into the economy.”

Does he know what “demand” actually is? And can it be injected?

The Keynesian left often uses mechanical words and phrases to describe nebulous processes. The aim in this case is to increase spending in the real economy to boost employment and lower social security payouts. There are many ways of doing this, mostly they don’t work.

For example, if civil servants went to a typical High Street to hand out briefcases full of banknotes, what would happen?

Two years ago most recipients might head for the nearest celebrity chef restaurant and drink the menu. On the way home they might pop into a jewellery shop to buy a bauble for the missus. That would push money into the real economy and boost employment. But it wasn’t needed two years ago.

Today, by contrast, a hollow-cheeked citizen would probably open the case and exclaim, “Now I can pay off the mortgage arrears, pay down the credit card, and put the rest into a savings account.”

Since all that money will end up back in financial institutions, it’s not going to affect unemployment at all. And since banks are hoarding cash while asset prices are falling, it’s not going to improve credit either.

Typically, Keynesians call this “priming the pump”. When was the last time you used a pump?

Demand is not a mechanism that can be turned on and off, it’s a psychological idea and depends on many unknown unknowns. Even then, is it actually “demand” we’re discussing here?

Do we walk into a supermarket and say, “I demand you sell me these eggs!” Or a car dealer’s forecourt: “I demand to own that car”. Of course not, demand is not involved at all, unless we’re robbing the place.

Our “needs” will generally be met in a downturn because we can tailor them to our resources, and we don’t actually need very much.

In a modern economy, it’s our “wants” that add the froth and pump up economic activity. By engaging in “demand management”, the government is really making us spend on inconsequentials, fripperies and other luxuries we can well do without. It’s trying to create “disposable income” which we can dispose of without a qualm.

Moreover, our wants are viewed from a different perspective when times are hard. The puritan side of our nature re-emerges and we scorn our previous spendthrift activities. We become rational again.

Odd, isn’t it, that our elected representatives prefer us to be irrational, and use our own money to bribe us into exuberant expenditure. How are they different from the pushy credit card companies at the height of the boom?

But it’s still not Demand, is it? Wrong word. Let’s use Wishful Spending instead.

I know it’s not as impressive or managerial as Demand, but at least it means what it says, and we would know what the authorities were trying to make us do.

Wishful spending management: the infantilization of the population completed. Mission accomplished!

Politicians have their own terminology of praise, faint or otherwise. One favourite is: “He has bottom”. Strange, it’s never used about a woman.

Does Gordon have bottom?

Well, you could do worse than glance at Gerald Scarfe’s wicked cartoon in today’s Sunday Times. Brown is depicted as demonstrating quantitative easing to members of the G20.

I’ll leave you to imagine the scenario … or pay the £2 price of the paper.

The roasting of Gordon Brown proceeds apace this weekend.

Yesterday it was Matthew Parris’s turn to take aim and fire. In The Times (London) he eviscerated, excoriated, then practically excommunicated the man from all polite society west of Margate and south of Dunfermline.

Today, Matthew d’Ancona of the Telegraph squeezed him dry till the pips squeaked: “The spandex-clad superhero has lost his aura of power. Mervyn King has cancelled his credit card.”

Peter Oborne also weighed in on Saturday with more thudding blows to an already bruised body. Following Daniel Hannan’s surprise rapier attack on European soil, the commentariat is piling in for the kill.

It’s not surprising. The world is expecting its Saviour-in-Chief to pull a giant rabbit from a small hat on Thursday. The G20 has been massively over-promised, thanks to Brown.

The decline is over, only the fall is left. Will he walk away now from the defeat that’s coming? Or will he limit the pain by calling a June General Election?

He’s no William Wallace.

The enigma at the heart of the hysterical response to supposed man-made global warming, is that paradoxically, its goals are so limited.

If carbon is indeed the problem, why keep trimming away at the edges? Why not ditch carbon completely?

At present, every human activity results in the production of carbon. Every morsel of energy we use, for light, heat, propulsion, manufacturing and servicing, somewhere down the line involves the burning of long dead trees.

It’s an astonishingly primitive process for a so-called advanced technological society. If we explained to a Stone Age caveman where our abundance of energy comes from, he’d remark drily, “We do that too. You’re not so clever after all.”

Where is the new motive power source for a truly innovative age that doesn’t depend on combustion of some sort? Wind and solar power require large areas of land to serve a small population, land that will be needed to grow food on in the future.

Greens want to chip away at the usage of carbon burning sources while the human population is doubling every century or so. It doesn’t add up.

All effort and investment should be directed at eliminating the combustion phase in the production of energy, not spending vast sums shoring up defences against future events which may never happen. If all the resources devoted to “green” alternatives were switched to that one objective, do you suppose it would fail?

Why pauperize whole economies in a futile attempt to empty the sea with a bucket?

Niall Ferguson’s thoughtful lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies (Get pdf here) on the trilemma of modern politics, prompts a lot of questions. Here’s one of them:

What halted the Doha international trade agreement was India’s veto. They were worried about the possibility of mass suicides among Indian farmers helpless against huge surges of imports into their country. Once again it was a clash between local sensibilities and a theoretical set of principles set out by the world’s power brokers. Local versus global.

The notion of “one world” is valid only on a spiritual level. As a philosophical Idealist, I certainly hold that view. However, on a practical level, it’s not true at all. Go and talk to those Indian farmers to find out why.

C.G. Jung’s description of a Collective Unconscious tells a complicated story. Many of the “archetypes” found there deal with self-preservation and can be terrifying to behold. He warned Westerners in particular not to lose themselves in this psychic realm because, as rationalists, they have no defence against the symbolic nature of it.

The nearest we have to a world mind is the internet. Jung would have been fascinated by it. However, his warnings ring true when some people get so caught up in the web of social media sites that they become unhinged and separated from reality. All those teenage suicides in the small town of Bridgend gives us an inkling.

People need feet of clay to be contented in this world. A satisfactory local environment is needed for mental harmony. It’s not speculative. It has actuality.

Our minds are not constructed to deal with planetary affairs, however much half-deranged politicians like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson may insist the contrary.

One World is forever an aspiration, never a finished construct. Only swamis in caves in the Himalayas can contemplate the cosmos as a unity.

For the rest of us, it’s business as usual, right here, right now. The G20 will produce only sporadic results papering over many cracks.

It’s the cracks we should be celebrating, not the glue. They are the real thing. The stuff of freedom. Wabi sabi, as the Japanese say.

When the world can live with its cracks and fissures, then a kind of unity is possible.

John Evans

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If we still harbour any doubts about the terminal meltdown of the British Government under Gordon Brown and the Labour party, a new report on the Foreign Office, once Westminster’s jewel in the crown, will dispel them.

New brooms sweep clean — no pressure then?

The report, which has been suppressed by Ministers, presents a picture of the FO as full of incompetents, “cowards” and “clones”. Here’s a snatch of yesterday’s Sunday Times story:

In the report … management consultants mourn the “tragic” descent into mediocrity of a once fine institution, expressing disbelief at the culture that operates in the offices behind closed doors at its imposing Whitehall headquarters. “From the minute one walks into [the] buildings, the office feels second-rate,” it says …

It makes excruciating reading for ministers, saying the once well oiled diplomatic machine is in danger of descending into “stagnation and decay” as it is throttled by “uncertainty, political jockeying and vacillation”.

Every section of the 42-page report, which covers leadership, decision making, communication and the working environment, is critical.

It doesn’t help Labour’s defence that the FO is headed by one of it’s brightest hopes for the future, David Miliband.

The fact is, this is typical of the collapse of government at all levels, and across all departments, in Gordon Brown’s Whitehall. One by one they are declared “not fit for purpose” while Brown slots in yet another party hack to sort it out.

As if David Cameron won’t have enough to do with the grave economic crisis when he arrives at 10 Downing Street, his wider job will be to salvage the entire government machine from the knacker’s yard.

In his darker moments, he must be tempted to throw in the towel and walk away from it. Make no mistake, Whitehall is the British version of Ground Zero.

Sorting out the mess
When a job is too big for mere mortals to handle, the solution is to prune it down into manageable pieces. Cutting and slicing is the only valid response.

In terms of foreign affairs, the answer is to regain control of areas that matter, while withdrawing from those that don’t. Here are our recommendations:

From What if the UK left all international organizations?, March 13, 2009

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 XIV, 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.

Other stories related to foreign affairs are linked to below:

John Evans

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I don’t suppose you’ve thought much about sausages lately. You should, sausages can be very instructive.

Many people buy supermarket sausages, but most of us prefer not to know what’s in them.

Put them in a pan and the aroma is so lip-smackingly enticing we would forgive our butchers almost anything. The smell arises from a cleverly assembled mixture of herbs and spices designed by food technologists to whet our appetities and taste buds before we’ve even bitten into the succulent pink objects they create for us. In food terms they really are masters of the universe.

If, however, we decide to delve into the innards of these encased and elongated meatballs, we get a completely different picture. For the contents are blended into a reddish goo in which excessive fat is made palatable by chemicals called emulsifiers. The meat itself is sliced and diced from every part of an animal’s carcass, including the bits we don’t normally talk about. If you think you’ve never eaten eyes or testicles or intestinal matter, think on, they are there on your breakfast plate every morning.

The point I’m making — somewhat ellipically — is that most of the old financial system is a dog’s breakfast.

Derivatives in particular, especially asset-backed structured vehicles (what a mouthful for a packet of sausages) bear a great deal of similarity to their culinary equivalents. The minced mush is largely made up of bits of sub-prime mortgages squashed together with a few half-decent ones. The alluring aroma is added by the blue-chip rating agencies, while the packaging is designed by investment bankers — who paradoxically have now almost ceased to exist.

Who would have thought that in 2008 we could make a credible comparison between sausage-makers and the high-flying gadabouts of the celestial world of brokerage and financing.

Today we hear that the two surviving giant American investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have turned themselves into “holding banks”, which will allow them to beg on the streets for any deposits we the people may have remaining after their Attila the Hun rampage through our domestic balance sheets. They will also gain access to Government funds designed to bail out the banks.

In common parlance, Goldman and Morgan and the other stricken titans are signing on the dole.

Of course, most of the movers and shakers have already salted away their massive bonuses and are probably even now relaxing with a cocktail or two on their yachts in Monte Carlo harbour.

They have left us with a colossal mountain to climb. In the UK, house prices have a further 25-30 percent to fall, according to Roger Bootle, and already Britain’s largest mortgage lender, HBOS, has failed. How many other banks will go before we hit bottom?

Who, then, are the people that created this vastly complex set of financial instruments based on the always-temporary phenomenon of rapidly-rising asset prices? And who were their managers who let them do it?

It appears that a large number of them are alumni of the Harvard Business School, even those working in Britain and Europe. President Bush is one of them. British PM Gordon Brown has surrounded himself with such types for more than a decade.

U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, once CEO of Goldman Sachs, is a member of this esoteric band of brothers. Not surprisingly, his main effort currently is to package up all the bad debts of the banking sector into one giant sausage and dump it into the arms of the taxpayer. Not only have the public been fleeced by the Harvard Templars, they have to pay off their debts as well.

Unfair though that may seem I’m aware that it is probably the only way to save world financial markets. The “flight to safety” from U.S Treasury funds mid-week was the Crack of Doom approaching at violent speed. A dollar default was much nearer than any of us imagined.

Here’s a suggestion to the politicians working on better regulation for the City of London, Wall Street and Frankfurt. Item one in the new schedule: Never employ anyone with an MBA from Harvard.

Have a nice lunch. It won’t come free. Avoid the sausages.