From the heights of our self-imposed ordinance of “No politics”, you might be led to believe that there’s very little else to write about.

I’ll admit the air is very thin up here on the moral high ground, but there really is something to get worked up about apart from the dismal state of the nation. What, you may ask?

Why, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course.

I’ve written a few pieces recently on the state of the Church and of Christianity (see the footer of this article), suggesting that the Gospels are allegories of a process used by early mystics with a universal truth for us in our scientific age.

The texts suffered the indignity of being converted into quasi-historical documents for the political purposes of the Roman Empire.

Rowan Williams, the current incumbent at Lambeth Palace, often gives the impression of being a thoroughly wet liberal who takes the soft option on every issue of our age. His undoubted intellect is seen as a barrier to both truth and communication — Gordon Brown in a cassock.

But wait, who is this speaking from the pages of Friday’s Daily Telegraph?

Addressing the Hay Festival of Literature on author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the Archbishop says, “First of all he takes the Christian myth, or a version of it, seriously enough to want to disagree passionately about it.”

Leaving aside the impression of clutching at straws, look at the words: Christian myth. Slip of the tongue, perhaps? Or the realization that a modern audience simply won’t take the infantilized story presented to us as fact any more?

I believe many theologians in the Church, whether of England or Rome, know this to be true. One historical Cardinal is said to have remarked, “The Jesus myth has served us well down the years”. Is Rowan Williams echoing that sentiment, but in a less cynical way?

Williams continues, “It’s not just dull or remote, it’s dangerous. You’ve got to tussle with it. It’s still alive.” The words of a mystic indeed.

But he’s not a pushover. He disagrees with Pullman’s atheism, but likes his “search for some way of talking about human value, human depth and three-dimensionality, that doesn’t depend on God.” By this he means Blake’s and Michaelangelo’s depiction of the Creator as an old bearded man looking down on us from a very great height. Inner resources can carry us much farther than a rigid anthropomorphism.

Then, something very intriguing: religious authorities shouldn’t “silence the demons” that people carry with them, the essential internal conversation between good and evil. C.G. Jung could not have put it better.

“The threat in Pullman’s novels,” he goes on, “is the Authority — people like me in his imagination — which wants to divide the human spirit and cut off and silence that demonic voice, that voice of the imagination.” Or even that voice of experience, he might have said.

I think this is a very significant moment for the old Church of England. Coming close to pantheism, or at least panentheism — where everything is God, even our enemies — the Archbishop speaks with the real voice of mysticism.

In these dark times, the inalienable lightness of darkness does need to be explained. Rowan Williams may well be its establishment prophet.

Who would have thought it?

John Evans

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I’ve decided to give up writing about politics on this site. The reason is that, with a new business to run, there simply isn’t time.

Writing about politics is an all-consuming activity. It glues you to 24-hour news almost 24/7. It entices you to read all the serious newspapers and political magazines every day of the year. Add to that, time spent trawling the internet, Googling for clarifications and chasing up leads, plus the background research and fact-checking.

Instead, Syntagma will revert to type and concentrate on a melange of finance, philosophy and technology as in days of yore.

I know I shall be tempted to dip inky fingers into the increasingly murky waters as the British General Election gets near, but be assured Reader, my resolve will hold.

Except, of course, to raise a hearty cheer, and glass, when David Cameron walks into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.

The rest is silence …

John Evans

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Is this the worst British government ever?

It depends whether you include a few autocratic Kings in the mix. The reigns of King Stephen and George IV would be impossible to simulate today, given that they both bankrupted the country, George was utterly dissolute, and Stephen invented perpetual civil war.

Although King Henry VIII created the framework for English liberties until the invention of the European Union, his reign must have been ghastly to live under, especially for people situated anywhere near a monastery.

With the advent of democracy, the governance of the nation became a little more accessible, if no less fraught on occasions. In living memory, though, it’s hard to think of an administration so cackhanded, corrupt, violent to its opponents, and so thoroughly despised by almost everyone you meet as Gordon Brown’s.

His economic arrogance and incompetence have ignominiously fly-tipped the country into approaching bankruptcy. His apparent lack of concern about the vast vault of accumulated debt — a Fort Knox stuffed full of IOUs and demands to pay where our Sovereign wealth fund should be — amounts to the greatest danger the country has faced since the second world war.

Not even Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in tandem created such a mess.

We are told to look at pictures from the Great Depression of the 1930s and to compare them with photographs of today. It’s nothing like as bad, the Brownites cajole.

It’s a specious argument, for even pictures of the time before depression looked exactly the same. That’s how people were then. That’s how they dressed.

The relatively affluent, smartly-attired and well-nourished folk queueing up outside Northern Rock for their life savings last year does not represent a lesser event, it simply reflects the way we are now.

The loss of wealth is profound and, in Britain, will exceed the losses of the 1930s in percentage terms. It’s the relative destruction of value that counts, even if we do start from a higher base.

On sleaze, Brown’s government has long overtaken the John Major years. As Major wrote last week, Brown continually lies about what he inherited in 1997. It’s blatant, casual and, when done in the House of Commons, should lead to an apology, followed by resignation if repeated on the industrial scale of a Gordon Brown. But he is oblivious to both honesty and honour.

The latest scandal, over expenses claimed by MPs and Ministers, is part of a long line of misdemeanours and allegedly criminal acts committed by this Labour government.

The system of allowances that corrupts Members of Parliament, rather than pay them at a commensurable rate, is absolutely typical of the Brown dispensation. Part cowardice, part concealment, part fantasy, partly adolescent, part corruption, part greed, part lust for the trappings of office, it has nothing whatever to do with good government or the needs of the country.

Yes, I can safely say, this is the worst British government ever. This generation can perhaps come to a new understanding of Guy Fawkes and his motives. Getting rid of egregious evil in power is not easy — and Brown has a year to go, according to the rules.

Today, as you hear MP after MP wail, “I did nothing wrong, I didn’t break the rules”, remember that is Gordon Brown’s passport through to June 2010. He has the rules on his side.

Can he be allowed to take us all for fools for so long? His disdain for public opinion is well known.

But he may find it will overwhelm him long before his time is up.

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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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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Here at Syntagma Towers we groaned at the news that Edward Kennedy is to get an honorary Knighthood at the request of Gordon Brown, a long term friend of the Massachusetts Senator.

The fate of Mary Jo Kopechne, left to drown at Chappaquiddick Island by the younger brother of JFK, destroyed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes for ever.

The incident was made worse by Kennedy’s failure to alert police and rescue services for 24 hours or more. Did Brown not remember this shameful incident while planning to devalue British chivalric orders?

I suppose if you’re prepared to debauch the nation’s currency, and find room for Stalinist Eric Hobsbawm in the Companionship of Honour, you’re beyond doing the right thing.

Of Knighthoods, Shakespeare got it right:

When first this order was ordain’d, my Lords,
Knights … were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage …
He then that is not furnish’d in this sort
Doth but usurp the sacred name of Knight,
Profaning this most honourable order.

Quite.

It’s official. Labour will lose the next election.

At least that was the strong impression given by Peter Mandelson on the Andrew Marr programme this morning.

Discussing the problems of the Royal Mail and his unpopular efforts to privatize 30 percent of it, Mandelson said that Labour had tried to do this a number of times before, without success.

Then the crucial admission: “This is the last throw of the dice for this government.”

Slip of the tongue? Freudian whatsit? Silky way of subtly distancing himself from the coming defeat by predicting it, while sticking it on Gordon Brown?

Or do we overrate the Machiavellian powers of this man for whom “the last throw of the dice” might be equally appropriate?

After criticizing the government’s handling of the financial crisis many times on this site, I’ve received a few indignant communications asking “What would you do then?”

Here’s what I wrote on January 23:

“Of the £650bn [public sector] pot, an emergency £150bn cut would be relatively easy, if painful for some. Overpaid operatives in the sector could be offered the choice between a 25 percent pay cut or redundancy. This would rebuild the public finances and make room for tax cuts. Brown built his empire, let him now dismantle it for this country’s sake.”

Paul Johnson wrote this week of the 20 percent pay cuts across public services during the 1930s depression (Spectator).

Now hundreds of thousands of workers in the private sector have quietly agreed to pay cuts already. Many more have been laid off altogether or put onto shorter working weeks. Why then should the public sector be immune this time round?

The answer is twofold: Brown is afraid of public sector strikes, and is averse to clipping his “client state” for electoral purposes.

Politics is the art of the possible, but I believe that most people in the public sector should realize they can’t be set above the rest forever.

David Cameron and George Osborne will face a wall of ideology, propped up by buttresses of self-interest, when they come to power. It’s vital, though, they don’t shirk the dismantling of Brown’s folly.

We now know that Gordon Brown has sunk an extra £219 billion a year in real terms into his personal vanity project, the equivalent of the massive pyramids built by dodgy Pharaohs in ancient Egypt.

Lopping £150 billion off that is not beyond the wit of determined Conservatives.

On Thursday, Prince Charles is to claim we have 100 months to save the planet from “irreversible climate change”. A strange assertion in the circumstances.

Man’s contribution to natural global warming is unknown and, in my view, probably greatly overstated by the anti-capitalist activists who push the argument to ridiculous levels.

However, consider what they might say if the present economic crash had not happened, and countries around the world had voluntarily reduced their greenhouse gases by the same amount as the drop caused by the current world depression.

Wouldn’t they be ecstatic with delight and self-praise? Imagine the articles in The Guardian claiming the moral high ground. I don’t think the phrase: “100 months to save the world” would be uttered by anyone. Why spoil a great story.

Furthermore, has any of the followers of James Lovelock considered that a prolonged world depression might be the handiwork of Gaia — the supposed self-regulatory mechanism of the planet itself?

If Gaia exists, it’s precisely what you would expect, is it not?

According to the theory, Mankind is an irrelevance in all this.

A few months ago I succumbed to the Twitter craze, mainly to find out about “microblogging” — messages limited to 140 characters, or less.

For illustration, the paragraph above is 138 characters.

I don’t use the account very much (twitter.com/Syntagma), and I haven’t delved into it beyond spraying out a few tart comments from time to time.

However, there’s a vast hinterland behind Twitter, comprising hundreds of applications that allow you to aggregate, sort, search and personalize the modest, low wordage utterances of the Twitocracy. Some Twitizens even believe it’s the way news will be distributed in future.

How does Twitter make money? It doesn’t. Google has denied it will buy it, which must put the kibosh on the service pretty soon.

Who else will snap it up in the current climate? Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers? Few takers, I think.

It’s more than likely that a new class system will emerge, with toffs who read newspapers, and twits who tweet like birds.

The fate of an earlier Canadian Conservative Government is casting the gloomiest of shades over Labour MPs. In 1993 it was reduced from power to two seats in the Canadian House of Commons.

The Canadian meltdown has no equivalent in British politics, although the Tories have been in the doldrums for 12 years and sometimes it must have felt like that.

Now it’s Labour’s turn to ruminate their fate and sink into political bipolar disorder. Could it happen here?

The Canadian House of Commons has 308 members, the British House, 646. Two seats in Ottawa would translate into 4.19 at Westminster.

Is it possible that Labour could fall into single figures at the next election? Unlikely, but a double-figure result should not be ruled out.

With Gordon in charge, the campaign will be clunky. Whatever advantage a sitting government gets from being in power will be cancelled out by his dire performance.

His closest colleagues will be more interested in positioning themselves to take over the leadership than saving his neck. The mood of the public will be explosive and there could be rioting on the streets.

David Cameron, on the other hand, will undoubtedly run a smooth and impressive campaign, with all his senior people onboard for a return to power.

The LibDems and other parties will be severely squeezed. UKIP Tories will want to be on the winning side, while the BNP will take votes from Labour.

It’s hard to see how a Conservative landslide can be avoided. But a Canadian-style meltdown is not the British way.

If it were, who, we might ask, would be Labour’s 0.19? There are plenty of candidates for that role.

John Evans

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As a person without any debts, and four bank accounts coloured black, I awoke yesterday morning to find the country’s National Debt at £2 trillion ($3tr) and more. That represents more than £60,000 ($86,000) and rising per household. It dwarfs Britain’s annual national income of £1.4 trillion, and doesn’t include other off-balance-sheet liabilities.

Since I am a genuine citizen of the United Kingdom, I am liable for that sum, and probably more from people who can’t or won’t pay, and from more recent arrivistes who decide to desert the heavily listing vessel.

I won’t get an invoice in the post: “For gross mismangement of the economy by Gordon Brown”. That would be too candid and straightforward.

Instead, I’ll find almost every public and private bill will rise, while any receipts will fall and services diminish. Prices in the shops will also start to balloon in a year or two and will remain high for decades to come.

Thus, this debt-free individual, who earns his own living, with savings in the bank and other less liquid assets, will suffer the consequences of others’ malpractice through substantial impoverishment.

Almost everyone in the country will be on a similar path, except those with institutional parachutes to comfort, like politicians, top bankers, and the upper reaches of the Civil Service who caused the problem at source. In modern Britain the buck only stops when it nestles in the pockets of the guilty.

The principal culprit, as almost everyone now realizes despite his increasingly-pathetic attempts at shovelling it off onto others, is Gordon Brown, the man who ran the Treasury with an iron fist from 1997 to 2008 and has been British Prime Minister since then.

In France, within almost living memory, he would have faced the guillotine. In Britain, more likely disgraced and forced into a humbling exile. Even now, he can be impeached by a much-abused nation. Why is this not being discussed?

The other big number this week is 219. Not so significant, you might imagine until you add “billion” on the end. £219 billion ($311bn) is Brown’s yearly overspending in real terms, i.e. above inflation. (From Bankrupt Britain by City fund manager, Malcolm Offord.)

It’s not good economics, but multiply that figure by 10 and you get a rough approximation of the new National Debt.

The pity of it is, the money was wasted. Almost no improvements are discernible in public services over the period while most have gone downhill, the result of politburo-style management and misuse of public funds at every level, much of it from incompetence, the rest from jobs-for-the-tribe. Snouts in the trough doesn’t begin to cover it.

Once again a Labour Government will leave office having wrecked the country.

* In 1929 we had the British version of the Great Depression to look forward to.
* In the late 1940s it was by restricting markets from operating at all while Germany and Japan freed up their workforces and built the foundations for their current strength.
* In the 1970s, Britain was placed at the mercy of the IMF, followed by the Winter of Discontent.
* This time, the nation has been hollowed out, its vital wealth-creating engine crushed. A decade of its earnings simply squandered on a whimsical mountain of public services that struggle to operate on any level.

It didn’t help that this time Labour was given three Parliaments to wreak its usual havoc. How did that happen? By guile, neglecting the truth, cooking the books, making false claims about almost everything … and getting away with it thanks to friends in the media who complacently turned blind eyes to the accumulating shambles.

Will Brown be impeached, do you suppose?

Do elephants ski?

John Evans

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Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is an affable cove, argumentative in a jolly sort of way, but with a hidden seriousness often overlooked.

He is frequently right in his assertions, occasionally he goes badly wrong.

He’s at it again, arguing for an old-fashioned version of free trade in the face of a worldwide downturn and a rush to shore up national economies and infrastructures long neglected by obsessions with global solutions.

Bring back the status quo ante, cries Boris, in the teeth of a gale of rage against the tattered remnants of the ancien regime.

His article in this morning’s Daily Telegraph promotes the classical case for free trade: specialization (a result of what’s called “comparative advantage”) and an acceptance of a dependency on others for a wide range of the necessities of life.

The UK, for example, has specialized in financial services in the City of London and elsewhere, while allowing a massive dependency on the rest of the world for manufactured goods and agriculture.

Hold on, wasn’t Britain once the “workshop of the world”? Didn’t we produce some of the greatest agricultural produce on the face of the earth? Weren’t these skills central in pulling us through two world wars in the 20th century?

Explain then why they were sacrificed to the make-believe world of finance, which absorbed many our best graduates, turning them into barrow-boy traders, or designers of financial gambling instruments that inflated the entire planet with unpayable debt?

Is that what Boris means by free trade?

And here’s another conundrum: why have British politicians, especially Brown and Blair, deceived the public into signing away national control over critical aspects of life and commerce to the most unresponsive and cack-handed organization ever conceived in the world’s long history? I refer, of course, to the elephantine European Union.

Is that free trade, Boris? If it is, there’s a large majority in this country that would prefer not to have anything to do with it.

The fact is, free trade, like all freedoms, has to be designed around the grain of human nature, not the mental machinations of policy wonks. It starts with the individual, not a bureaucratic oligarchy.

Does anyone believe the crackpot system we have had across the world, and in Europe, for the past decade has covered itself in glory? Most of it was built up during the “hunkering down together” period after World War II, when legislators were terrified of further wars.

Ninety percent of that system has proved itself redundant and ready to be scrapped. “Free trade” has become synonymous with maintaining this failed superstructure.

The next British Government, which may at some stage include Boris Johnson, should heed public rage at the restrictions of the hated European settlement. A loose trade association is all Britain will require in the century ahead.

And what about democracy, Mr Mayor? How is it that each treaty we sign, each organization we join, hands power on a plate to international bureaucrats at the expense of the very people in whose name this sacrifice is made? The rootless sherpas of world politics and trade have no knowledge of local needs or cultural preferences. Peter Mandelson is a perfect example.

The most dangerous pressure cooker for politicians of all stripes is a build up of anger and frustration by large numbers of people who believe their voices are not being heard. That’s how revolutions start. We should have long outgrown that primitive tendency.

Free trade is easily done if you have something worth selling and the other chap has something worth buying. The big bloc approach masks the necessity to develop products and services that are useful to others.

There is also a vital requirement to have a balanced economy that is not brought down by the collapse of a single sector. Cuba’s reliance on one crop, sugar, is a classic example. Britain’s lop-sided specialism in financial services and house swapping will be viewed in the same light in future.

David Cameron will be at his strongest when he first comes into power. He should use that power to ease the UK out of the EU and into an Associate position on its perimeter. He will not be forgiven if he fudges that essential step.

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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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