A splendid interview on this morning’s Today programme cheered up the prospect of facing leaden, snow-laden skies.

John Humphrys met Business Secretary Peter Mandelson in a contest of heavyweights. It was a game of two halves.

Humphrys opened play much too respectful of his wily interviewee. Mandelson took the early rounds easily, brushing off the challenges with effortless aplomb.

Then the BBC man found his steel. Changing tack, he began to question Mandelson’s definition of protectionism. Saving British jobs for British workers is not protectionism, he argued; that’s when governments ban other country’s products. Some of us have also been arguing the very same case for a while.

Mandelson rebutted/refuted that line too, but was now firmly on the back foot. EU purity is his passion. He would not retract an inch (sorry, centimetre) of the radiant way, as defined by Brussels.

A scrappy period of play ensued with raised voices, claim and counter claim. Humphrys stuck to his line, however, while Mandelson descended into bluster and even developed a stutter not often heard before.

The result was a clean knockout for the Welshman, while Lord Mandy made the best fist he could of defeat.

As I’ve said before, Mandelson is not to be trusted with British policy in this important policy area during times of acute economic distress.

We need British politicians for British workers.

Flipping through the 24-hour news channels yesterday reminded me how boring news can be most of the time. Crimes, especially murders, are often given prominence where once they would be confined to local bulletins. Nowadays, the most trivial of occurrences get an international airing.

It’s the same for local news. I once stayed overnight in Aberystwyth, Mid-Wales, and turned on BBC Radio Wales for the local news. The top two items were:

1. A man fell off his bike on a country road near Borth this morning. He suffered a grazed knee. The bike was undamaged.
2. Children had to take sandwiches to school in the village of Aberllor today as the dinner lady has ‘flu.

Obviously Mid-Wales is a very peaceful place to live.

The question remains, would you rather view 24-hour rolling TV news or watch paint dry?

The wise would choose drying paint. It’s reported that Bodhidharma, founder of Zen Buddhism around 500AD, sat staring at a wall in meditation for nine years.

They must have had very slow-drying paint in those days.

Money Central in The Times (London) is running a feature: The 10 people most reponsible for the recession. Here’s the list:

1. Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers
2. Hank Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary
3. Alan Greenspan, former Fed chief
4. John Tiner/Hector Sants, both of the FSA
5. Fred Goodwin of RBS
6. Gordon “British jobs for British workers” Brown
7. George Bush — what will we do when we can’t blame him for everything?
8. Kathleen Corbet, former head of Standard and Poor’s
9. Hank Greenberg, head of collapsed insurer AIG
10. Angelo Mozilo, biggest sub-prime lender in U.S.

No-one is spared, it seems. Everyone is to blame.

Let’s shoot the human race.

There are many words used to describe our current financial and economic situation: meltdown, downturn, crash, recession, slump, “lost decade”, depression, Great Depression.

We know what a recession looks like because Britain has just officially entered one: two successive quarters of negative growth. But what about the rest?

Actually, after recession bites, the rest don’t matter, except “slump”, which is a poetic rather than a technical term, and “depression”. “Great Depression” is an afterthought slapped on by historians.

So what is a depression? Ronald Reagan gave the folksiest description: “A recession is when your neighbour loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.”

Technically, though, a depression is a fall in output of 10 percent from peak to trough.

Clearly, we’re not there yet, except possibly in Korea and some other Far Eastern economies. If the IMF is right and UK output is set to fall by up to 3 percent this year, it will need to be a long slump to make up the depression numbers.

However, another trend of the past two years has each successive forecast revised sharply downward. We could be in depression sooner than we think.

On the River Exe we have around 250 swans, nominally wild, but in fact incredibly tame. Anyone walking by with a plastic carrier bag is quickly surrounded by plump, gangly birds expecting to be fed.

Lots of people bring bags of white, sliced, supermarket bread — surely the most ghastly food invented by man — to feed these charming creatures who, incidentally, are all owned by the Queen.

The swans pile in with gusto, as do countless terns, gulls, pigeons and, given the chance, 50 or more snow-white geese.

Our river is a wide, flowing waterway with masses of nutritious waterweed housing small water creatures. The swans also have acres of grassland to graze on. Why then do they scramble for stodgy human scraps?

The answer is that people with bread are their welfare state — the “something for nothing” option. They don’t have to turn upside down in the water to feed off waterweed, or lumber up grassy slopes to munch on tender green shoots. Anything is preferable to hard work, as we know, never mind that their natural food is organic, wholesome and good for them.

When generous benefits are given out like Smarties by the State, aren’t they turning recipients into subservient animals?

John Evans

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

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

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

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

Reference: Sensible protectionism is not a sin

John Evans

Geopolitically we find ourselves in unaccustomed circumstances as we head into the New Year: the Anglosphere — Britain, the U.S. and Australia in this case — is dominated by the left, while Europe is firmly in the hands of the right — France and Germany, in particular.

Those who speak for AngloSaxonomics are well and truly on the back foot. Curiously, Germany’s Angela Merkel is leading the charge for sensible government spending from within a continent notoriously prone to big government. The turnaround is complete with a return to sterile and ultimately dishonest Keynesianism in the free market transatlantic countries. “Topsyturvy” hardly begins to describe it.

This balance may improve with the election of David Cameron’s Conservatives here in the the UK sometime before summer 2010, but it doesn’t alter the fact that we are in the grip of ideologically-driven governance in key Western countries at a time of acute economic stress.

In times of panic, and we’ve had plenty of those in 2008, politicians revert to type. Gordon Brown’s evident delight in resurrecting the ideology of his youth is plain to see. Chancellor Alistair Darling’s mid-30s were dominated by a bleak Trotskyite outlook on life. In his 50s he’s managed to nationalize a goodly portion of the banking sector, whatever the reason.

Barack Obama and his team are an unknown quantity, but should not be expected to think too far ahead when the printing presses are in full flood. Obama’s role model, F. D. Roosevelt was a President of the left who was not afraid to bring out the big guns of public spending. Payment came later. His reputation rests on his actions during World War 2, especially after Pearl Harbor, which masked the disaster that was the Great Depression and the responses to it.

The enduring problem with the left is that it doesn’t understand human nature. Few liberal-left politicians seem even to know themselves, let alone the rest of the population.

Self-knowledge is the key to good governance. You can’t speak for all, if you don’t speak for yourself. Knowing how to exercise power is not the same as understanding those at the receiving end of your writ.

As a substitute for having a grip on reality, the left has an alarming tendency to fall back on a collection of failed shibboleths: the United Nations, global solutions, so-called human rights, more central government, higher taxes, collectivist policies in general. They don’t recognize that in troubled times most people feel helpless to help themselves. Their world has spun out of control and they need to take it back — not pass it on.

In a crisis, it is important psychologically to direct power to people in their own patch. To open up avenues to self-help, to understand the desperation of active citizens to be in charge of their lives and their families. Crises always seem to put them even more under the thumb of centralized authority rather than set them free to do what they do best in their own interests.

The Brezhnevian Gordon Brown foolishly imagines that the British want a Stalinesque “father of the nation” to lead them out of hard times. Nothing could be further from the truth. The current rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia is an eerie echo of a bad past and should warn us of trouble ahead.

What we now require from our leaders is human psychology, not “universal” human rights that only we respect, and the politically empty “brotherhood of Man”.

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As part of an extensive reorganization of the business as we enter our fourth year, we’ve redesigned the logo.

Last year, the old one got rather lost on our company Christmas card, so its demise was on the cards (pun intended).

After trawling through a miserable selection of samples from pro designers, I sat down in exasperation and created it myself. Shock, horror from the designers — self-promoting, naturally.

As the customer, I’m always right.

And it looks great on our newly-printed Christmas cards.

What a day to have a birthday. With the world and its future darkening visibly around us, and crunch turning to munch, we’re all seemingly heading for lunch on a plate, not seated at the table.

However, amidst all that financial chaos there is some good news: Syntagma is three years old.

Three is a significant number in horse, dog and internet years. Horses get to run in the Derby, dogs are the equivalent of 21, and anything on the internet is a virtual centenarian.

When we started out 36 long months ago, this site was a pure technology and media play. It was also the cheerleader for the launch of new sites on a large sprinkling of topics. Now I write here only about politics, finance and technology, in that order of magnitude. You won’t need to ask why, discerning Reader.

Many of the old staff have moved on — those who remain have aged visibly, some even look like centenarians.

Enough of the past, it is another country as someone once said — The Shire, perhaps. If the future looks more like the Land of Mordor, I fancy we’ll glean something of value and interest from it, and certainly something to write about — whatever horrors it throws at us.

So what’s the prognosis for Syntagma’s fourth year of operations, bearing in mind it is a business as well as an online publication?

In the wider world, freight shipping is slowing at the same rate it did at the end of 1931. There are so many similarities popping up between now and the 1930s, it’s beginning to take on a distinct Tolkien shade of dark mist and distant pointy mountains.

Even Russia, with it’s massive half-trillion of cash reserves, is sliding into a downward spiral towards another bankruptcy and authoritarianism.

We ourselves on this sceptred Isle will not be spared a decade of pitiful growth, or none, as we purge the vast vaults of debt accumulated under the deceptively-stern gaze of Prudence in recent years.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it in today’s Telegraph, “The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.”

Well, we are still here. And we will prevail until we come out the other side like foot soldiers returning from the trenches. In internet age, I calculate we’ll be around 300.

Something to celebrate, surely?

P.S. As a contrast with today, here’s Syntagma’s first birthday piece. Read here.

John Evans