SYNTAGMA » David Miliband

Saturday Ramble: A leader, a leader, my Kingdom for a leader!

John Evans — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:45:36 +0000

David Miliband is said to be odds on favourite to win the Labour Party leadership. That’s assuming, of course, that the AV system of voting doesn’t promote a rank outsider to the job, as it has a tendency to do.

Frankly, Diane Abbott would serve them right.

But let’s take Monsieur Miliband’s chances at face value. He is thought to be smart. At least according to a smitten Hilary Clinton, who took an immediate shine to Senor Miliband on a trip to America. We will investigate his “smartness,” or otherwise, in a moment.

His supporters claim he has “bottom,” that is to say, gravitas, presence and leadership qualities coming out of his … well, you get the picture.

The problem for Herr Miliband is that no-one really knows who he is, or what he stands for, and what kind of leader he would be.

Is he authoritative? A Churchill? Clearly not. A thinker, like Harold Wilson, who had so many thoughts he virtually paralyzed himself? A doer, like Clement Attlee, who built a crypto-communist state in this green and pleasant land?

We simply don’t know and would have to take him on trust, as we did with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. That’s not a reassuring thought.

So let’s look at his alleged smartness. In a speech a few days ago, he produced a kind of personal manifesto that he wants to enact across Britain. He thought Gordon Brown would achieve it first, which is why he supported him as Prime Minister. Brown did precisely the opposite, demonstrating that the new would-be Dave does not have good judgement.

I’ve removed the padding from the following passage, leaving the Miliband concept structure in place:

“… we [need] renewal … greater moral seriousness and less indifference to the excesses of a celebrity drenched culture … greater coherence as a government, particularly in relation to child poverty and equality … party reform and a meaningful internationalism … civic morality to champion civility when confronting a widespread indifference to others … optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope.”

Compelling, isn’t it? (Heavy irony alert). It reads like an assiduous, but vacuous, student’s manifesto, packed with nebulous aspirations, but no hard policies, nor any notion of what paying for these empty dreams will cost the nation. Just imagine him on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den trying to raise funding for his scheme.

“Er, what exactly is your product, Mr Milibond?”
“It’s band actually.”
“It’s a rock group?”
“That’s my name.”
“Rock group?”
“No, you don’t understand …”
“We need to know what you have to sell.”
“I don’t want to sell anything. I want to improve society, Europe and the international community.”
“Through rock music?”
“No, politics!”
“Ah, you’re a think tank?”
“No, a party.”
“So you want to set up a party organizing business for … whom exactly: kiddies’ birthdays?”
“No! For the benefit of the people.”
“Which people? We need to know your market demographics.”
“We’re going for the centre ground, plus any minority grouping we can bri… er, persuade to back us.”
“What do you estimate your profits at for years 1, 2, 3 and 4?”
“We don’t do profits, we have deficits every year, so we beg and borrow the rest, mainly from the trades unions.”
“So you have no intention of making money, just surviving on debt?”
“Like the country.”
“You are not a country, Mr Multibond. You are a non-existent company, with no money, no plans, no product, just idle hopes and dreams that have no relevance to the modern business world.”
“Exactly, it’s called the Labour Party. And the name is Mili not Multi.”
“Mr Mili, you’re fired.”

John Evans

DIARY: Football: the Syntagma Regime, Dying eurozone, Annoyment: Fairness, Dave at G20, Miliband’s banana, Pic of Week

John Evans — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:38:35 +0000

What went wrong? everyone is asking — as if it isn’t obvious.

German coach, Franz Beckenbauer got part of it right when he said that the English Premier League, with its two cup competitions, leaves players exhausted by early summer and “burnt out” before major international competitions: the European Championship and the World Cup.

This is known as the Headless Chicken Syndrome, which was clearly visible in the team’s performances in South Africa. What to do about it?

1. Reduce the league by one third and disallow Premier clubs from playing in what used to be called the League Cup. That would help. What else?

2. Back in the early 1990s, Denmark failed to qualify for the European Nations Cup. The players were dismissed for the summer and they trailed off to the Med for a spot of the sybaritic life.

A few weeks later, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists, had to withdraw because of the wars in the Balkans. As next in line, Denmark was called up for the Finals. Back trooped the sun-soaked team, with no preparations whatever for the matches. They won the Championship.

England should adopt a similar relaxation routine before major tournaments.

3. I would also scrap the manager’s position and select an experienced team captain to pick the team and lead it on the pitch. That would meld the players better, and eliminate neurotic influences off the pitch and from the sidelines. It would also save the FA around £12 million a throw.

I’m no expert on football, but surely the team couldn’t do any worse under the Syntagma Regime?

* * * * *

The eurozone, and hence the European Union, is dying. Like a rotting mackerel in moonlight, it shines and stinks.

Labour’s continual bleating about “supporting the economy” for another year, now seems like a reedy squeak amid the worldwide scramble for retrenchment. California alone is said to have cut its spending this year by as much as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania and Hungary combined, despite Obama’s scratchy comments against European deficit cutting.

The major cause of this growing panic is the eurozone’s acute sovereign debt crisis and the approaching European banking collapse. There’s not enough money to solve these problems. They won’t go away. The fuse is lit.

The Bank for International Settlements has stated that sovereign debt problems are nearing boiling point in half the world economy.

Unless Germany immolates itself to save the Mediterranean countries, a bewildering realignment of nations is about to take place. America can probably sit this out, given its self-sufficiency and huge in-house resources. With the Fed printing money again at industrial levels, the US will get through this crisis, emerging at a lower level of wealth, but comparatively richer than the rest of the world. China is not immune either and may have severely overstretched its resources.

For Continental Europe, almost certainly it will mean the splitting of the eurozone and the end of the European Union as we have known it. Quite how it will fragment, and what bits will be left clinging to each other is hard to say. But Germany will have to regurgitate the south of Europe and retrench within itself by relaunching the deutschmark. Berlin is said to be printing the banknotes as I write this.

Other northern countries will follow suit, while negotiating their own relationship with the central-European giant.

The UK — luckily, and only just, under a Tory regime — will retreat into itself and sort out the inherent problems. With discipline it could emerge the stronger for it.

The resulting chaos looks set to mark the end of the post WW2 global settlement of downgrading nation states in a world run by international socialists. In the longer run, despite the chaos, this could be a positive development.

* * * * *

Annoyment of the Week

Fairness is a very annoying word. It’s being used obsessively in British political discourse now. Why?

Ask someone to define it and it usually boils down to: “something that works to my advantage”. That’s how Gordon Brown’s Labour Party defined it. So too the Liberal Democrats who now use it more often than Labour, even from within the Coalition.

For most people, a vague sense of Robin Hood hangs about “fairness”. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is seen to be fair, although taking anything that is not yours is clearly stealing.

In olden days, the Sheriff of Nottingham would store his loot … er … taxes in large caskets piled up in his personal treasury. There it would lie, perhaps for years, a huge chunk of spending power wrenched out of the local economy. No wonder they were mostly dirt poor.

Today, the wealthy are the main drivers of economic activity by investing their treasure in companies via the stock exchange or in special bank deposits. Cash is recycled into the most profitable channels, boosting jobs and growth.

Thus, if you take from the rich and give it to the poor, who do not invest because they have no surplus, you are depriving the economy of much of its driving force. In the end, that penalizes the poor most.

The simple concept of fairness used by politicians is merely a vote catcher. It has no validity in the real world. It’s usually linked with “equality” which doesn’t exist in reality either. A top-down equality, forced by the state, would look very like North Korea.

Real political fairness is when everyone has a genuine job, not a portfolio of welfare benefits.

* * * * *

David Cameron did very well at the G20 in Toronto. He has a natural way of being a Prime Minister that allows him to get along with all the others.

Where Gordon Brown had to chase Barack Obama into a hotel kitchen to beg for a bilateral on-camera, Cameron sat easily side by side with him, exchanging bottles of beer and jokes, while hitching a lift in the President’s personal helicopter. Obama even mentioned the “special relationship”, a subject which embarrasses most British people I know, because it’s not something that should be talked about.

I think Cameron is aware that “the business of America is business”. If you can do business, you’re special, if not, not.

Brown never came across as special. David Cameron does.

* * * * *

David Miliband says his worst mistake was not eating that banana before he hit the streets during the Party Conference.

Why would anyone walk out of their hotel carrying a banana anyway? Did he think it was cool? Was it his Mr Bean moment? Did he suppose it would humanize him?

He was offering himself for the leadership of the party at the time. Which party did he think it was? The Orangutan’s? Is he trying to tell us something?

On Newsnight last week he was in a hustings line-up for the Labour party leadership … again. What qualities could he bring to the job? Well, he said, “I wrote the Climate Change Bill”.

Most of the programme’s audience must have glazed over with thoughts of nine slop buckets in every kitchen, and a bill of £18 billion a year until 2050 to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint by 80%.

No other country is offering anything like as much. It will bankrupt future generations and lop only 1% from global carbon emissions. In other words, it will have no effect whatever. That Bill is now the law of the land.

Neither David Miliband, nor his even more geeky brother, Ed, can ever be trusted with the leadership of Britain. After Gordon Brown, we should investigate every leader they put up for the job with scrupulous cynicism.

The Mili brothers have already ruled themselves out.

* * * * *

Picture of the Week

The River Exe last Sunday morning. Click through twice on the pic for a larger image.

Photo by John Evans

John Evans

Election Notebook: Are the Tories imploding?

John Evans — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:40:11 +0000

I caught a bit of the would-be Foreign Secretaries’ debate on BBC2′s The Daily Politics on Monday.

LibDem, Ed Davey was clearly out of his depth. The real Foreign Secretary, David Miliband was hardly in the league of past giant’s of British politics who have occupied this post. Can you imagine him following Lord Grey of Fallodon’s “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” That scenario is increasingly likely.

What was worse was William Hague’s nodding in agreement with Miliband more often that one would care to witness in the present circumstances. He appeared to be in thrall to power, unable, just as David Cameron was last Thursday, to challenge the current orthodoxy despite the shrieking signs that all of it is disaster in the making.

Where is the grit and the fight in the Conservative Party to bite back against this trend? Can no one make a powerful case for the defence of Britain against the most destructive government since Wilson’s and Callaghan’s in the 1970s?

There are two week’s to go to the election. Thursday’s debate on Sky will be watched by a million or two, not the 10 million that tuned into ITV. If David Cameron performs well it will not sway as many voters as Nick Clegg’s strong showing last week. Although there will be a rowing back from that peak, the LibDems will retain some of that advance in the polls.

With all the parties swarming in the soggy lower centre ground, the Conservatives need to show strong leadership in areas they are associated with. The Big Society of the manifesto had no follow-through, and is far too complicated to explain in a few weeks. It should have been presented more clearly months ago.

Only stark choices will resonate now. The scandals of massive immigration, hopeless schooling, pathetic healthcare, and betrayals over Europe and the soldiers who fight our wars for us, need to be presented with a vigour that only Brown’s endless lying and cheating can match.

Otherwise, the Tories will fade away, neither blue nor green, but a very pale shade of indeterminate pink, having a view on nothing tangible that will galvanize a clearly confused electorate.

If neither Cameron nor Hague can produce the goods against mediocre opposition in the debates, what chance is there for the breakthrough necessary right now?

I remain optimistic that there’s something in the pipeline ready to explode. My worry is that there’s only a pipedream, drowning not waving.

John Evans

Saturday Ramble: What if Labour were to win?

John Evans — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:51:34 +0000

Imagine the worst possible scenario: May 7, Gordon Brown and Sarah walk into Downing Street to cheers from a carefully selected crowd of Labour party agents and apparachiks. He shakes hands manically, his painted-on smile glowing like a supernova.

Against the odds, Gordon has won another five years as Prime Minister, with a parliamentary majority of 20. The predicted surge of tactical voting for the Tories failed to happen, largely because the turnout was very low: 37%. It was a battle of the core votes and client state. Only Labour could win.

Pundits claim that the three 90-minute TV Leaders’ debates were so boring they turned the nation off at the plug. The country slept through the election as a result.

The Tories are shattered. Television vox pops confirm that voters didn’t know what they were offering; it was too technical and there were no big sweeping themes to enthuse them. The gamble of relying on Brown’s unpopularity flopped spectacularly, especially as large parts of the Tory core vote simply stayed at home.

Tabloid overnight phone polls seem to confirm that if Cameron had offered a trade-only relationship with the EU at the top of his menu he would have gained enough votes to give him a 30-seat overall majority.

Naturally, Conservative Eurosceptics are furious and demand his head, which he offers without protest. George Osborne takes over as Tory leader.

Scroll forward two years: the economy is in a double-dip recession. The peak-to-trough drop in national output rises to 11 percent — a full-blown depression, dubbed by the media as Britain’s lost decade.

Brown is so unpopular a serious leadership challenge is mounted against him by senior Cabinet colleagues. At last, the old fraud is toppled and David Miliband becomes Prime Minister.

The Conservatives are 25 points ahead in the polls, while a series of by-elections reduce Labour’s majority to one. As Britain’s place in international league tables collapses into the mid-teens, while its credit rating falls to triple-B, interest rates rise inexorably.

A vote of no confidence is passed in the House precipitating another general election.

The Conservatives get in with a majority of 150. George Osborne goes to the Palace, while David Cameron becomes Chancellor, William Hague Foreign Secretary.

At a late supper of meatloaf in the Number 10 flat, Osborne says, “2010 was a good election to lose.”

Cameron’s lip curls, “For you, you mean.”

John Evans

DIARY: Syntagma Books, Annoyments, Scottish calumny, David Milibug, Advice to Cabinet, Zealotry

John Evans — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:42:04 +0000

Syntagma Books’ next title is a republication of one of my favourite John Buchan novels, Huntingtower. I wrote about it in a recent diary entry under Gorbals Die-hards

There follows an extract from a 1922 newspaper review of the book — paper and writer unknown:

August 4th 1922
MR. BUCHAN’S LATEST ROMANCE

Huntingtower, by John Buchan.

(Hodder and Stoughton. 7s. 6d. net).

His setting is the Scottish seacoast, and an untenanted mansion, in charge of a crew of surly, furtive lodgekeepers, who have something to hide, and betray the fact; and of a rough inn-keeper, who is desperately anxious to dissuade travellers from staying at his house.

There is a Danish brig, and a landing by a boat’s crew of villains by night, and in stormy weather. There is, inevitably, a beautiful foreign girl [a Russian Princess], suitably provided with unscrupulous enemies, and with an unwelcome suitor, who will stick at nothing. For the necessary contrast of the prosaic with the picturesque there is a middle-aged and wealthy Glasgow grocer, a stout-hearted fellow at bottom, who has sold his business and blunders into this whirl of picturesque violence at the bidding of a life-long passion for romance, which his retirement has set him free at last to indulge.

Dickson McCunn has many engaging qualities besides his simplicity and kindliness. He has a harmless vanity which makes him thrill with pride when he over hears praises of “D. McCunn, the great provision merchant”, a praiseworthy habit of carrying Izaak Walton in his pocket when he goes on pilgrimage, and an invincible belief that what is needed to defeat the lovely foreigner’s enemies is the “sound business head” which has brought him his prosperity and modest fame.

As a piquant novelty Mr. Buchan has hit upon the device of introducing a band of ragged Glasgow lads, [the Die-hards] formed into an unofficial body of boy scouts. In the exuberance of their youth, they march to such songs as “Class-conscious are we, and class-conscious wull be, Till our fit’s on the neck of the Boorjoyzee”, learned by one of their members at a Socialist Sunday school. But these are battle hymns, sung for the sake of their rhythm, without regard to their meaning, and the boys are unreservedly, not to say violently, on the side of law and order.

Priceless. How could you resist?

John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, was a Conservative MP and Governor-General of Canada.

* * * * *

Annoyment of the Week
A Gordon Brown-free zone

For your eyes only. Keep this under your hat.

Met Office official alert for November. Dated: October 30.

“November heralds the return of autumn”

I could have told them that after a quick glance at the calendar.

Or could it be a secret coded message as used to appear in The Times in Sherlock Holmes’s day: “Die Wetter ist besser im sommer”.

“Watson, I have it! The weather is better in summer. Germany will invade England between June and August.”

“But, Holmes, surely not during the Ashes series.”

* * * * *

David Milibug, aka Miliband, Britain’s putative Foreign Secretary, is playing a devious, but rather obvious, game of seeking the yet-to-be-created post of foreign minister of the European Union.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether he gets the wretched job or not. He’s welcome to it. Its only reward is to provide ego cover and material support through the long period of the Labour wilderness years to come.

After his unforgivably inaccurate attacks on the future Foreign Secretary, William Hague, this week, he will get little succour from the new Whitehall.

With little brother, Ed, a possible leader of the Labour rump after the election, and doomed to fail, he will know that the seat is being ably kept warm for him when he returns from exile.

And what of Mandy Pandy? Big Pete has always lusted after the Foreign Office, ever since his grandpapa, Herbert Morrison, held the post for all of seven months after the war. There are seven months left of this Parliament. Mandy could hardly resist.

It all sounds so cosy. The words “world” and “oyster” suggest themselves.

Not so fast. Labour’s coming drubbing in the polls is likely to be savage. As Chesterton put it:

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

* * * * *

Did you know that in 1728, the Royal Bank of Scotland became the first bank in the world to offer overdraft facilities? Apparently so.

RBS was established to provide a bank with strong Hanoverian and Whig ties to England, as the rival Bank of Scotland was involved in raising funds for the Jacobite Rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was missing out on the “Royal” title even before he set off for Derbyshire and his nemesis.

Two banks at war. Two banks now in the wars. History and politics are never far from large concentrations of money.

Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, worked for RBS in his early days, probably blissfully unaware that he was consorting with the “enemy”

Isn’t life grand?

* * * * *

For New Labour:

We each have a personal myth, a story which builds gradually from our parent’s stories, our cultural myth, and many other factors. In this story, we are the main character, other people are secondary characters. They, however, have their own stories, which are usually radically different from ours.

Society is built on resolving the clash of these personal myths. Civilizations are constructed to preserve collective and national myths. When powerful people’s inner stories meet in dissent, whole continents can dissolve into war.

Such is the power of our personal story. Most people are not in command of their story because it’s formed from a ragbag of inherited ideas, and pressures from all manner of influences. This leads us to devalue ourselves and splits us from our essential authenticity.

That is the thesis of Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican doctor and surgeon, who grew up in the tradition of the Toltecs. In his book, The Voice of Knowledge, he distils it into four principles, or agreements, as he prefers to call them. At first sight, they could be taken for a boy scout’s creed : tell the truth, don’t take things personally, don’t jump to conclusions, and do your best. But this would be to miss the point. Used as talismans of action, the Four Agreements become a powerfully transformative path to happiness and success.

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

Strongly recommended to all members of the outgoing Cabinet.

* * * * *

Watch out, the zealots are coming.

Who mediates the media? The answer is, in almost all cases, the zealots.

Zealots have a long history. You may remember them from the New Testament. Whatever the purpose, there is always zealotry in there somewhere.

Far from history being driven by “the economy, stupid”, as the Marxist zealots insist, it is in fact powered by all manner of zealousness.

Now, there is nothing wrong with some elements of zeal per se. Without enthusiasm there would be no progress, and probably no fun either. But we must distinguish between zealotry and enthusiasm. The latter is harmless, the former has an unbreakable intent.

Since the media — especially television — will not tolerate anyone who is dull or superficially uninteresting, the zealots have a head start in the race to be media performers, and even controllers of the pipes.

That brings us on to what a zealot does and why zealotry is bad for us.

The present zealotry can be summed up in a few words and phrases: “European Union”, “New Labour”, “carbon footprint”, “green”, “climate change”. Even religion has become the possession of zealots the world over.

Zealots rule. They mediate us from their positions in the media, religion, politics, education and much of current discourse.

If we refuse to follow their harsh prescriptions, they have ways of subtly ostracizing us from society, with weasel words like “right wing”, “eccentric” (once a noble estate in England), “Extremist”, “not one of us”.

In the age of an overwhelmingly powerful media, we must learn to mediate ourselves or become slaves of the new zealotry.

John Evans