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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll be listening out intently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember the “world car”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain did lead the world once, why not again?

John Evans

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Imagine visiting the newly elected President of a major friendly country in a time of economic stress, and arguing that the very people who elected him to office should not be given preference in his decisionmaking. Instead, they should be delivered up to the abstract opinions of unaccountable international bureaucrats.

1. Who would be so insensitive to the democratic settlement even to harbour thoughts of more global institutions?
2. Who could be so boneheaded as to set foot in “the land of the free” arguing the ideas of international socialism and world government?
3. Who on earth would then start talking about a “special relationship”?

The answer to all three is: Gordon Brown.

It was apparent from the barely-disguised “when will this end?” expressions on Barack Obama’s face that he was not particularly impressed by Brown. Furthermore, he’s not going to deliver anything of substance at the G20 Brownfest in London next month.

Let’s be clear, mild protectionism — as in “ABC jobs for ABC workers” — is an absolute duty of faith to anyone ELECTED by the people of a nation state. That is the democratic bargain. Why vote, otherwise?

Believing it’s almost a crime to be partisan towards your electorate in hard times is a mental disability for politicians. It places your own sensibilities before the needs of those you are elected to defend. In other words, it’s an act of unforgivable selfishness.

In the second chapter of the Indian Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is about to lead his army into battle against nearby enemy forces. He’s helped of course by having Krishna, “the supreme personality of Godhead”, as his charioteer.

“How can I fight these people,” he says, “they are my uncles, cousins and nephews?”

Krishna replies, “Because it’s your duty to protect your own people. You are their leader. They have no-one else. Your task is clear. Fight and win the day. The time for compassion is when the battle is over and your people are safe.”

Gordon Brown needs to rethink his “moral compass” and decide between his overblown intellectual pretensions and the people he is contracted to support and defend. Let him read the Bhagavad Gita and recognize that he too is confronted with Arjuna’s Dilemma.

This is no time for self-indulgent student Marxism.

John Evans

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Watching Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday reminded me of what Swiss philosopher and psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung thought: “Only 200 people really understand what the world is, and how it works.”

Plainly, none of them has made it into the House of Commons.

Reading about the cash-for-legislation gravy train in the House of Lords last week — mainly among appointed Labour members — it seems that the luminaries are sparsely represented on the red benches too.

Next up were the “show trials” of our top bankers before the Treasury Select Committee in Portcullis House. I failed to spot a single member of the illustrious order among the grovelling and shamefaced money men.

A day later, during Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s grilling by Heads of Select Committees, it was apparent that our PM is far from understanding how banks work, let alone the planet. As a “saviour of the world” he cuts a droopy figure.

Are we in Britain unusual in having no-one from the great 200 among our leaders and shakers, or is this state of affairs evenly spread across the global political and financial elites?

Alas, I have to report, I truly think it is. Nobody who knows what the world is, and how it works would feel comfortable in the spheres of politics and banking. And yet these trades are vital to our civilization and way of life. Are we doing something wrong?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of people are programmed to operate within a rather narrow band of experience — even the high-flyers among us. Once activity breaches the limits of that band, whether above or below, they are like fish without water, humans without oxygen. They rapidly lose all sense of reality.

No-one can really be trusted to behave well in the wider interest when events are excessively good or painfully bad. Unfortunately, we are moving rapidly from the former to the latter condition, where we will be no better served than we were in the wild, expansionary phase.

Whereas in the growth period we could at least fend for ourselves, we are now dependent on other people to lift us out of the communal mess. Many of our fellows will be in thrall to people they never intended to imbue with such power over them.

Already the bogey of fascism is being held up to make us feel more at ease in the Marxist version of human life, which has never failed to destroy the human spirit and snuff out any light on the horizon.

So where are Jung’s 200 outstanding ones?

Perhaps they are Nobel Prize winners. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, thinks Britain should default on all its bank liabilities, as Iceland has done.

Since British bank debt far and away exceeds our annual income as a nation, that would not only make us a pariah State never to be trusted again, it would also plunge international finance into an unstoppable economic ice age.

Paul Krugman, a recent economics Nobel laureate, who once praised Gordon Brown in the New York Times as “the man who saved the world”, now writes, “this looks an awful lot like the beginning of the second Great Depression”.

That has been apparent for quite some time. Even depression guru Ben Bernanke at the Fed is struggling to hold the line, while keeping the printing of money in reserve. His British counterpart, Mervyn King, is treading water too. The ECB chief, Jean-Claude Trichet, is behind the curve on rates as well as on “quantitative easing”, which the Germans are determined to oppose.

All are waiting for the “tipping point” when it will probably be too late to act effectively.

It’s almost as if this were meant to happen, with the key players frozen at their desks. The world may have to go through this calamity to purge the vast excesses of the past.

In Jung’s late memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he presents a view of the world at variance with both scientific and popular opinion. As a psychologist, he knew the power of mentality, and how a belief system can become embedded in the collective unconscious, for good or bad. “Psychological contagion” was one of his more powerful phrases.

Those few who really understand what the world is and how it works, may be standing aside and bowing to the inevitable.

In the end, there’s no difference between down and up. They just taste different.

John Evans

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In the aftermath of the Jeremy Clarkson affair (another one?) in which the Top Gear presenter called British Prime Minister Gordon Brown “a one-eyed Scottish idiot”, I’ve reached for a word from Old English to say more or less the same thing.

“Puddled” means “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED). In common parlance that translates as, batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

Mind you, a few months ago I pioneered the Clarkson approach by quoting Rudyard Kipling: “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu …”

Well, Downing Street is north of Khatmandu.

So is Gordon puddled? He’s obviously quite clever, and has some abilities, none of them of a personable nature. His problem is that he carries a series of assumptions that most of us find totally barmy.

Each age has its set of assumed truths around which it frames its policies and actions. Future ages usually look back in horror at what their ancestors thought, while imagining their own assumptions to be the height of sense and modernity.

Their children and grandchildren will think otherwise.

Just read contemporary accounts of medieval witchcraft trials or the very detailed archives of the Cathar Inquisition, and you’ll visit another planet.

But that’s the point. Historical records are a kind of time machine allowing us to escape the pin-down effect of the assumptions of our age. Great figures in history are usually Time Lords who roam freely over the past and project themselves into the future with ideas ahead of the game.

Bad Prime Ministers and Presidents are stuck in the rut of “modern” thinking on a range of issues. They are so much of their time, they become ridiculous in less than a decade.

When the baby boomers came to power in the 1990s, something changed radically. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought the 1960s with them into office. It was all informality, “Call me Tony”, and that most typical cry from the era, by Danny Cohn-Bendit, “We have no policies, only demands, and when they are met, we will have more demands” — the wail of spoilt children everywhere.

In the spirit of the age (1960s), nobody must be offended, even if they are highly offensive. Under Blair and Clinton, society was divided into small segments. Some were chosen for special treatment, especially members of the tribe and those who could be counted on to vote for the new settlement. The rest were demonized.

The prevailing Marxism of that former era was enshrined in law as the Equality Agenda — no-one was allowed to stride ahead of the crowd on merit or effort. Every area of life was dumbed down, and continues to be in Britain under Gauleiter Harriet Harman.

Gordon Brown fits into the pattern. A baby boomer to his armpits, he devotes a great deal of time and thought to the Trotskyism and Soviet tractor plans of his youth, and runs the country accordingly. Moreover, his Scottish accountant’s mentality contributes heavily to his dour, pernickety personality.

A new generation of politicians is already taking over. They reflect society in general by rejecting baby-boomer thinking with contempt, especially as it has brought the entire planet to its knees in under a decade.

Brown’s espousal of “global solutions”, by which he means the shabby superstructure created after World War II: the UN, EU, World Bank and other doddery examples of the model, is completely counter-productive in an age of the internet and face to facebook communications.

Much looser arrangements, with greater freedom for individuals, where genuinely democratic units, like Nation States, will regain their purpose, are just around the corner. The wired age will not be pushed about by people like Brown, and the roaming political sherpas of another era. They will be seen for what they are, a branch of liberal-left fascism.

Global “solutions” will shatter into a mosaic of bilateral agreements that satisfy each party involved. The world will become a more interesting, diverse and complex place to live.

And that’s exactly how most of us like it.

So is Gordon Brown puddled? Remember the definition: “to occupy oneself in a disorganized or unproductive way” (OED).

Or in common parlance: batty, off ‘is ‘ead, loony, daft as a brush.

I rest my case, M’lud, and ask for the Court’s indulgence for my client, Jeremy Clarkson.

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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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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