Suspension

For much of this year I have not been able to devote as much time as I should have liked to this blog and I feel it would be best to suspend it while I pursue a couple of other projects.

Thanks to everyone who has read it. I hope to be back in the New Year

Tim

Monkey business

The Rev. Paul Flowers, head of the ethical Co-op Bank, has been caught buying crystal meth and cocaine.

The radio sternly reminded us that he had been receiving £130,000 a year from his Co-op members.

What? how much was Bob Diamond on at Barclays? £8 million?

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Double standards

There's been a frightful amount of nonsense about David Cameron gong to Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Conference. The Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada have stayed away.

Sri Lanka has a poor record on what I suppose we must call 'human rights' and there is little or no freedom of the press.

Awful? Cameron has just been to China, for Heaven's sake, which has a far worse record, stretched over a longer period and inflicted on vastly more people. When he was brown nosing the corrupt, undemocratic cabal which lead that benighted country, did anyone say he ought to have stayed away?

Sri Lanka at least has proper elections.

Happy Birthday

It is Prince Charles' 65th birthday today, and he will spend it at the Commonwealth Conference. This event is no less ridiculous than it always was, but given renewed importance as we desperately search for someone other than the bankrupt EU to buy our exports.

It is telling that at the age most people retire, we are still waiting to see if Charles will live long enough to get the job. This blog hopes he does.

New flag

The BBC reports that a misprinted Union Flag was flying near the Cenotaph in Manchester
yesterday.

I think it looks rather good. We need a new design if Scotland leaves the UK and this could be it.

Camus

Today would have been the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize winning novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. In fact he died in a car crash in 1960.

Whilst most commentators attach the 'Philosophy of the Absurd' to him, he was rather one of the great humanists, a socialist like his one-time friend Sartre, but who argued with Soviet Russia's Labour camps and the enforced starvation in the Ukraine. His argument with Sartre over whether the philosophy of socialism was worth the appalling suffering was one of the great philosophical duels of he 20th century. His analysis of the Manichean undesirability of two Powers, the USA and Russia, in many ways defined the Cold War.

He was only 46 when he died.

Spanish practices

It is reported that 87.8% of Spanish voters have little or no trust in Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

What helps him sleep at night is that 91.3% have little or no trust in his opponent Afredo Perez Rubalcaba.

Sharia money

David Cameron has announced that the Government would issue Sukuk bonds, that is to say debt instruments which comply with Islamic Sharia Law. Interestingly, the number of sukuk issued has fallen dramatically of late, after an influential Imam pronounced many of them invalid. You have to get the terms just right.

What interests me is what happens if there is a dispute: does the UK Government have to submit to foreign religious courts?

That would be an interesting development.

Get away....

The delightfully named Soren Bo Sondergaard, a Danish MEP, has written in a report that some of the EU funds designated for rebuilding the city of l'Aquila after the earthquake in 2009 may have gone to companies with ties to organised crime.

Imagine, Soren! (or is it Bo?). Corruption! In Italy!

Even more surprisingly, Brussels has denied it, not believing that such a thing could happen.

It really does make you wonder.

Lies, damned lies....

The CBI has put out a paper saying the benefit to the UK of being in Europe is between 4% and 5% of UK GDP, or between £62 billion and £78 billion.

So that's it, then. Nice and precise, these are the guys who know, question answered.

Unfortunately it's drivel.

The figure was taken from a digest of other figures which are themselves dubious: many decided on what the answer was and set out to prove it.The CBI itself has always been vigorously in favour of the European ideal and not so long ago was telling us we would be tragically left behind if we didn't join the euro. We're not hearing too much of that any more.

And there is no analysis of what would happen if we left: the savings in the contributions we make, the elimination of swathes of bureaucracy, just the stale, idiot assumption that Europeans would no longer buy our goods even though we bought plenty of theirs.

Much of what you read about the European debate is rubbish, but if it comes from the CBI, assume it's 100% wrong.

Calabria

A short holiday in Calabria, one of Italy's wildest regions.

There are some places well worth seeing, though they are far apart.

We managed to avoid getting the car stolen, and were not pickpocketed or mugged.

Then we got back to civilised Rome and found someone had burgled our flat.

Lou Reed

There was cool, there was very cool, and then there was Lou Reed, who has died, much too young

RIP

Patronising

As I write, it is supposed to be a sensible hour of the morning - 7.30 - but it is 6.30 because the State has decided it should be.

I am not a revolutionary but I could wish, if the people were one day to rise against their masters, that this patronising, bullying measure would be one of the reasons. The State fondly believes that we - you - cannot be trusted to get up a bit earlier in summer and a bit later in winter. It clings to the idea that we cannot organise a Parent-Teacher Association to set the school hours according to the seasons, and that farmers are as stupid as their cows.

To confirm them in this belief they put out all kinds of drivel and lies about improving tourism and road safety which even the most witless of our citizens can surely see through.

Once again, notwithstanding the massive importance of the person making the declaration, the earth will continue to go round the sun in the way it always has, and the same Prime Mover which gave us the planets and the stars has also gifted us - and the animals in the forest - the ability to get up at the right time.

Leave us alone.

Bugged

Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, says that it is 'really not on' (congratulations to the translators) for America to bug her personal telephone.

Well. We are not talking about Burkina Faso here. Germany has some of the best electronics companies in the world and if they couldn't protect the Chancellor's 'phone, something has gone badly wrong.

My guess is that this is mock outrage, and that in fact Mutti ('Mummy' as she is called) has given the head of the Foreign Service a roasting he won't forget.

But his job is safe because to fire him would be an admission of incompetence

This stuff is for the proletariat.

Colour coordinating

It appears that a family in Ireland has had their child taken away because it was White and blonde. The family were .... um ....not white, or rather not very White: they were Roma.

What on earth is going on here? It is not as if the police were looking for a specific child and suspected this might be it. They were going round a Roma camp and saw a child which looked out of place. Do they have colour charts? If the parents are approximately No. 14 on your chart (Roma Brown) the child should be between numbers 8 and 13; if it is 7 (White including mild suntan) or less you can take it away.

Is this what is going on? Is this how we live? If so, it isn't working. The whitey child turned out to be the offspring of the browny parents and the police were left ..er.. red faced.

Boy George

We have to remember that in the absence of a fixed retirement age for the monarch (something which would be welcomed by this blog), Prince George is not going to be king until around 2075. He will be a very different monarch for a very different, modern, age, an age where, perhaps, in Andy Warhol's words, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

It seems a mistake, therefore, that he didn't sell pictures of his christening to Hello! magazine.

The breadline

This blog sends its commiseraitons to Veronica Lario, former wife of Silvio Berlusconi.

Her alimony cheque has been more than halved. Now she is going to have to live on €1.4 million.

Per month.

Energy prices

There seems to be a reluctance to face reality in Britain over the cost of energy. For years we have been told that the price would go up and up, and now it has, it is somehow a disaster. And not only a disaster but a fiddle. 'We are being cheated', they cry, and it is, of course, the horrid big companies doing the cheating. Trust me, when it comes to fuel prices, big companies are good; you don't want to be buying your energy from some tiny local supplier down the road, like a corner shop. That would cost far more.

Then someone introduced the idea of 'fuel poverty', where people were deemed to be fuel poor if they spent more than 10% of their income on fuel. Instead of pointing out that this is a complete nonsense - some people live in large houses in cold, exposed areas, some live snugly in city flats; some need to be warm, others don't - the BBC and several newspapers have been treating this bogus concept as if it were important..

Next we had David Cameron's wizard scheme to tell the horrid companies to put everyone on the 'best' tariff, thereby reducing the number of different tariffs available and reducing consumer choice which is what keeps energy prices down.

Then we had the astonishing economic illiteracy of Ed Miliband, announcing a price freeze if he won the election. Of course it is quite easy for the Government to announce a price freeze, simply by reducing fuel taxes by the amount the market price had risen. But this wasn't Mili's idea: he wanted to ban the horrid energy companies from increasing prices, even if their cost of fuel goes up. Of course what would happen is they would put up prices on election day, particularly if it looked as if the country were daft enough to vote for Miliband, and they'd put them up again at the end of the freeze period.

After all this swaggering incompetence, all it needed was for some senior political figure to keep the 'debate' going and attack those horrid companies. Step forward Sir John Major, Prime Minister, astonishingly, for more than six years. Now, this was a fairly inglorious moment in our history (remember the Cones Hotline? Back to Basics? Edwina Curry?) and you would have thought that having been such a risible disaster in power he would have had the decency to keep his mouth shut after he had been found out. But no, the man with the blue underpants wants a windfall tax on the horrid companies.

One wouldn't have thought this needed saying, but it obviously does. Energy is a fairly long term business, and the investors need to be fairly sure about future prices and returns. If the government suddenly intervenes with a new, unexpected tax they grow nervous and don't invest because there is an atmosphere of uncertainty. They invest somewhere where the government is more sensible.

Going back to the Miliband Plan, there are a few things people should know. The first is that part of the taxation regime is arbitrarily imposed 'green' taxes. These were popular with the previous government and several were introduced by Ed Miliband when he was Energy Secretary. They were very popular with David Cameron, who also fell for the Global Warming twaddle, although less so now that it has been disproved (the IPCC say Britain is due to get colder). The green taxes amount to around 15% of fuel bills, all based on some fashionable bogus science. They tried to cover up the additional cost by making it illegal for companies to mention them on the bills they send out.

The next thing people should know is that the Miliband freeze could well make things much worse. As stated, the companies will put up their prices to cover the uncertainty, but 2015-17  will be a period of stable or falling energy prices, as the Americans release their vast reserves of shale gas on to the world markets. At best, the Mili-freeze is unlikely to have any impact.

As to the claims that there is no competition, there are six large energy suppliers and I believe this is enough to permit competition to flourish.

I am not, here, appealing for lower energy prices or lower profits. I am appealing for some common sense to be spoken on this subject.

The monkey and the manager

Having suggested we ignore bogus racism in football, I was cheered to learn that the England Manager, Roy Hodgson, made a joke to the players during the half-time interval, concerning an astronaut and a monkey.

In the joke the monkey is given a number of tasks to perform in the spaceship and the astronaut asks what there was for hm to do. The reply from ground control is 'feed the monkey'.

In Hodgson's example, the monkey was a player of mixed race with the exotic name of Andros Townshend, who, it was hoped by the racism lobby, would be outraged. But he wasn't.

No one seems to have noticed, except perhaps Mr Townshend, that in a comparison with the joke, it is better to be the monkey than the astronaut.

Footballists

What are we to do about racism in football? It is almost a standard question for one of those TV or radio shows where famous people are asked questions by a hand-picked freethinking audience.

You always get the same sort of answer: the VIP loathes racism, there is no place for it in our modern way of life, da-di-da. This is intended more to boost the credentials of the respondent than inform us.

We need to have a good look at this because the nonsense is reaching crescendo level.

Is it difficult for a black man to get a job playing football? No, there are lots of them.

Are they paid less than their white counterparts? No.

Do they, as used to happen in Apartheid South Africa, have to use a different changing room to the whites? No

It is in the crowds that the racism is spotted - people making monkey noises and so on. It is in us, the people, not 'Football'.

And 'Racist' isn't the only '-ist' levelled as an accusation by the New Inquisition. There is a 'clubbist' or regionalist discrimination whereby, horror!, the fans of one team shout insults at the fans of another.

And, strangely enough, the world of football has been surprised to see the fans themselves resenting this interference. In England, fans of Tottenham Hotspur, traditionally called 'Yids' because of the high Jewish element in the area, don't resent it but carry banners calling themselves Yiddos or the Yid Army. In Naples, Italy, where there were cholera outbreaks at the beginning of the twentieth century and this is recalled by the chants of Rome and Milan fans, they now have banners saying 'we are the cholera sufferers'. Morbid, but the point is they don't want to be told what to sing or shout by the do-gooders.

Long may it continue.