"Never seen a country more bent on its own destruction"

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Lancing the boil of democracy

"Red Ed" was urged to do it two years ago, now Cam.

Hitchens says (or did, before he was taken off the paperwaves) the same cornucopia of lies that got Mr 37% his unexpected majority last week will swing behind No in the EU referendum, however neutrally-worded the question. I've said the same myself.

The people will vote for the loss of their vote. Probably for Wilson's "FOOD and MONEY and JOBS." Then they'll find, just like Greece, how much food and money and jobs are actually in the mess of pottage for which they've irrevocably thrown away their power to say no.

"And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother [is] a hairy man, and I [am] a smooth man."

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Spoiled papers: the strange disappearance of Peter Hitchens

 

 

I noticed the absence from the MoS early last Sunday; Steerpike joined in on Wednesday; no explanation. Now it's non-happened again.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action," said Goldfinger.

If it turns out that the country's most-read newpaper has censored one of our most famous and independent-minded commentators, we have breached a new lower limit in peacetime.

We're already the subject of comment in the USA - see Zero Hedge's "Britain: A Functioning Democracy It's Not" (8 May) - and Peter Jukes has analysed the gross partisanship of the British Press.

Perhaps it's not just the Left that muzzles dissent.


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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Defending savers: a letter to Mr Peter Hitchens

Mr Peter Hitchens
c/o Mail on Sunday
Associated Newspapers Limited
Northcliffe House
2 Derry Street
London W8 5TT


Monday, 16 September 2013


Dear Mr Hitchens


Inflation protection and government’s abandonment of its moral obligation to savers

I emailed you on 1st September in response to your Mail on Sunday article that day (the “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Carney?” section on monetary inflation and savers). If you have seen it and are simply not responding, then that’s fine, because you must be very busy.

But in case the email has not been forwarded to you (and I also tried to follow up with a comment on your blog that may have been blocked), please find enclosed a copy of what I said.

In brief, it seems clear that when NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced in 1975, both sides of the House in both Houses of Parliament accepted that protecting savers and pensioners from inflation was a social obligation.

Doesn’t this strengthen the case for restoration, and will you – with your high profile - help?


Yours sincerely

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

The dolorous stroke

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal


Hitchens (1):

A great grey Tower of Babel reaches up into the sky over Europe, lopsided, full of cracks and likely to collapse in the fullness of time...

For Britain, Europe’s oldest continuously independent sovereign state, [...] it is the end of 1,000 years of history, as predicted by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell as long ago as 1962...

In the EU, Ireland – no longer a Tiger – takes its place alongside Slovenia and Lithuania as a quirky, minor possession on the damp and unvisited fringes of the Continent, with almost no voting power.

Shorn – as it is now – of its ability to get in the way, it may find that the flow of subsidies will become much thinner in years to come...

The ascent of the EU happened to coincide with several decades of unheard-of prosperity and growth. But the EU did not cause that prosperity...

It was based on American Marshall Aid and helped along by American and British willingness to spend heavily on defending Europe against the USSR, while most of the EU nations kept their military budgets small.

The EU also cannot guarantee that Europe’s prosperity will go on forever. With so many member nations, many of them devastated by decades of Marxist misrule, its capacity to hand out subsidies is running out.

The credit crisis has not finished yet, Western Europe is fast running out of its own energy supplies and the shift of economic power to the Far East is speeding up, not stopping.

The European nations have not worked out how to deal with the enormous Muslim minorities which they have encouraged to settle on their territory and which increasingly demand the right to live according to their traditions.

Nor can they stop the slide of the manufacturing industry towards the regions where labour is cheapest.

Germany, still in a sort of post-traumatic shock over the cost of absorbing the Communist East, may not forever be willing to share a currency – and so a joint bank account – with the poorer and less well-run nations of the Eurozone.

Hitchens (2):

... At the coming Election, refuse to vote for any of them, and do so in such numbers that they can no longer claim they have any mandate to rule, so that their zombie parties collapse in a heap of dust and worms, and we can start again.

The alternative is the accelerating death of our civilisation.

Hannan:

People often wonder why national leaders are so ready to hand their powers to Brussels. Each successive EU treaty has weakened national parliaments, yet each has been enthusiastically ratified by those same parliaments, often in overt defiance of public opinion.

What makes the politicians do it? [...] Perhaps – let’s be blunt – they are defying their electorates in the hope of getting lucrative positions in the EU when their terms expire.

I realise that this is a big claim. But, in ten years as an MEP, I’ve seen it happen time and again.

I’ve watched people arrive in Brussels as moderate Euro-sceptics, but change their views as their lips become clamped around the teat of the expenses. I’ve watched ‘No’ campaigners turn into Euro-enthusiasts after being given sinecures.

Now Tony Blair is plainly not in that category. He was a Euro-enthusiast to start with, albeit in a rather vague, pro-Italian-holidays kind of way. And he’s hardly poor...

No, the charge against him is not that he abandoned his beliefs, but that he abandoned Britain’s interests...

Could the issue of the [EU] budget have been linked in Blair’s mind, even subliminally, with that of the presidency?

... if Blair really did seek to buy the presidency with British taxpayers’ money, he was almost literally selling his country – and there is a very unpleasant word for people who do that.

For those who believe in history with a human face, perhaps this is a punishment, for believing we could create some small and imperfect version of an Earthly Paradise, where even the poorest man would have a voice in his government, and have hope to better his position in society; where the bully would be held back by fear of punishment, and the powerful restrained by the apprehension of condign retribution.

My wife says she feels aggression everywhere, people arguing with bus drivers that they shouldn't have to pay. I say the hungry sheep look up and are not fed; we are lost and leaderless ; those at the bottom of society live in fear of the future, despair, impotent rage, having nothing but meagre dole given them with grandstanding condemnation and impossible promises of opportunity.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help, said the Psalmist.

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins

It always ends in a building project, whether the new EU Parliament or Ceauşescu's Casa Poporului...














But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more

It's not for us to take up arms. Worldly powers will rise and fall. Our defence, and the future, is the family. That is the nearest we can have to the Earthly Paradise.

PM to quit?

Peter Hitchens speculates that Gordon Brown may resign soon:

What will all these people do for a hate-figure if Mr Brown quits, as I think he will probably do on ‘health grounds’ before the Election?

I reconfirmed our electoral register details by phone yesterday; but I really don't know whether I will be able to vote for any of the candidates. Have we got to the point where mass abstention sends a stronger signal than positive choice?

It occurs to me that even using the phrase "sending a signal" reveals how much the political class has lost touch with us.

Hitchens against war

Really fascinating article by Peter Hitchens today, on what the world might have looked like if Britain had not declared war in 1939. And a wonderful three-paragraph (in the print edition) pudding of complaints about our present condition:

... if we won it, how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. We have a weak currency and shrunken armed forces, deployed as auxiliaries in wars that are not in our interest, and we are largely governed from abroad.

Our Parliament is a bought and paid-for puppet chamber. Our culture and customs have been debauched and our younger generations corrupted, as subject populations are, with drink, drugs and promiscuity.

We are compelled, like an occupied people, to use foreign measures to buy butter or meat, and our history is largely forgotten or deliberately distorted in the schools to suit anti-British dogma. Those schools are unable to educate most of our children up to the levels of our main rivals, so ensuring that we provide no challenge to them. Our country has been Balkanised into provinces and regions. Our language is invaded by foreign words and expressions. Our food and most of our consumer goods are imported, along with our TV programmes and films.

The remaining veterans of the supposedly glorious struggle, far from being gratefully honoured, often live in pinched poverty, scared of feral youths, or die neglected in squalid hospitals in a country many of them no longer recognise as their own.

A little over-egged, but still tremendously good.

A message to Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens seems to me one of the few independently-minded journalists in the mainstream media. One of the pieces in the MoS (and his blog) today reflects on the damage caused by BBC blabbermouth financial commentator Robert Peston and whether the credit crunch could have been anticipated. Hitchens says, in passing, that although he himself had bad feelings about our Roaring-Twenties-type economy, no-one really knew what would happen.

Rarely for me, I completely disagree with him, and think that if he turned his mind to this subject he might be influential enough to help some greatly-needed changes happen. So I comment:

Re your Peston piece and "The truth is, nobody really knew":

Sadly, this state of affairs was in fact VERY well-anticipated. As an independent financial adviser, I repeatedly relayed warnings via my newsletters to clients about the increasing debt in the USA, starting a decade ago. On 20 October 1999 I attended a breakfast meeting given by an investment company to drum up business, and a rep stated that the Dow was 50% overvalued. This confirmed me in the intuitive feeling I had long had, that a collapse was imminent. I feared the consequences so much that I put my business on the back burner and returned to teaching, which is something not lightly to be done, you will understand.

The stockmarket collapse began on the first trading day in 2000. Jerkily, the FTSE went down to less that half its 1999 peak by March 2003, at which point I thought lessons might have been learned and we could start to invest with confidence; but then (and you can see the BoE statistics online) the rate of increase of the money supply was allowed to soar by an extra 5% per annum. The investment bubble had turned into a banking bubble, which led to the horrendous property price instability that now threatens the financial system itself. The government is deeply implicated, since its regulators allowed banking reserves to be pared back (this is part of how you increase the money supply) so that when a crisis occurred, the lifeboats weren't there.

I repeat, very clear warnings have been sounded for a very long time by respected investment experts, mostly from the USA as the average Brit has very little understanding of money since we are rarely allowed to make or keep much of it. So I began a blog, in May last year, to learn more myself and to sound Cassandra-type warnings to any who would listen.

Bankers, politicians and economists knew very well, or ought to have known, the consequences, and the worst result of the present debacle is that it is likely that none of them will face Enron-style prosecution and punishment. They and/or their successors will therefore do it all over again, to their enormous gain and our near-ruin, as they have done periodically for centuries. Unless the perpetrators are punished in a way that will be remembered for generations, this moral hazard will continue to be a profound threat to our financial security and social stability.

You have written an excellent book on the mutilation of the British police, and I can promise you that the basics of finance are nothing like as complex as the professional fraudsters of the investment and banking community would like you to believe. I do really wish and hope that you will turn your investigative and communication skills to an analysis of what really went wrong with our Western economies.

Crime and punishment

Henry Wallis: "The Stone Breaker" (1857)

(I've brightened Wallis' painting above, but the foreground in the original is very dark, making a contrast with the gleaming, unreachable beauty of the twilit sky and its reflection on the lake.)

In a country with proper justice, nobody would dare intimidate a witness.

In such a country, wrongdoers are afraid of the law. They'd know that such a crime would certainly be prosecuted and that they'd end up doing at least 15 years breaking rocks.

... says Peter Hitchens in today's Sunday Grumbler.

"Pitee renneth sone in gentil herte," said Chaucer, sometimes ironically. The worthy compassion shown to unfortunates by the Victorians has, gone too far, some argue.

But there are now different reasons to pity. Prisons do not punish the wrongdoer in the old-fashioned ways, but the incarcerated man is no longer protected against bullying, beating, buggery and theft. In how many movies do we hear the police threaten a criminal with what his fellows will do to him in prison? Judge Mental does not put on his black cap and say, "You will be taken from here to a place of detention where you will have your arm forced up your back and..."

Then there's life outside, for the neglected underclass. "Theodore Dalrymple", a doctor who has dealt with many prisoners in Birmingham (UK), used to note in the Spectator magazine that prisoners' health improved considerably in prison, because of no (or reduced) access to drugs. Read the good doctor here on how the liberal approach to mind-altering substances is pretty much a sentence of death (prolonged and degrading). Here's an extract on alcohol:

I once worked as a doctor on a British government aid project to Africa. We were building a road through remote African bush. The contract stipulated that the construction company could import, free of all taxes, alcoholic drinks from the United Kingdom...

Of course, the necessity to go to work somewhat limited the workers’ consumption of alcohol. Nevertheless, drunkenness among them far outstripped anything I have ever seen, before or since. I discovered that, when alcohol is effectively free of charge, a fifth of British construction workers will regularly go to bed so drunk that they are incontinent both of urine and feces. I remember one man who very rarely got as far as his bed at night: he fell asleep in the lavatory, where he was usually found the next morning. Half the men shook in the mornings and resorted to the hair of the dog to steady their hands before they drove their bulldozers and other heavy machines (which they frequently wrecked, at enormous expense to the British taxpayer); hangovers were universal. The men were either drunk or hung over for months on end.

Our soft-handedness on crime and drugs, is really an extreme hard-heartedness.