I've decided that I've been posting too much this week

and if the recent pissing of pants and stamping of feet is anything to go by I've also used Internet search engines one to many times. Who would've thought merely reading the Nuremberg Code would have offended so many people?! So I will be leaving the blogging alone for a few days at least but before I do I can't help but thinking back to that random meeting I had on Tuesday.

You see it was back in October last year that Croydon Council had the bright idea of giving a job to someone who had a little or no qualification to actually do that job. In fact the only qualification they seemed to have was that they were a lesbian and that they had lived in Brighton. Neither of these things are particularly relevant to the provision of mental health care but are the sort of things you might think would have me finding common ground with that person. As it happens that didn't quite work out as planned and the whole incident could be considered could actually be described as counter-productive.

Now in October of this year Croydon Council appear to have had the same bright idea of awarding a vaguely defined job to someone with vaguely defined qualifications with whom you would think I shared some common ground. This visceral experience of deja-vu can only lead me to conclude two things;

• Croydon Council clearly has problems learning from it's mistakes through higher functioning processes. This would suggest a need to take a more Pavlovian approach to matters.

• Croydon Council clearly has money to waste.

Before I go I should take the time to reassure the state that I am fully aware of how highly unlikely it will be that the state will convict itself for crimes against humanity. After all with such clear sentencing guidelines nobody has ever pleaded guilty to that offence and every rapist, murderer and paedophile has that little facet of their consciousness that convinces them that they alone are justified in what they are doing and are committing no crime. It is that small delusion that allows them to commit the most unspeakable acts.

Britian's Losing Talent.

Yesterday Russell Brand walked out on the BBC, David Tennent turned his back on Doctor Who and everybody at the National Television Awards looked more then a little bit jumpy. I can't say I really blame them what with the government desperately trying to shift the blame for the governments mistakes on to the media which is more then a little unfair. After all it wasn't the media that decreed a woman should have no other role then that of a wife and mother.

It wasn't the media that spent millions of pounds making sure that diktat would be carried out.

It wasn't the media who put secured phone lines into to peoples homes.

It wasn't the media that intercepted mail and blocked telephone calls.

And it most certainly wasn't the media that placed the media under ceaseless attack over the last two years.

No, those crimes belong to the state alone and can rest nowhere else then at the states feet. Fair play some in the media are rightly feeling a little bit bruised having been suckered into playing along with the scam but there's no real shame in that. All spooks do is lie, manipulate, exploit and destroy. It is, if you like, their art form and it's not as if the media have been able to look back over the last 90-something years and see every generation get suckered in by the same old lines only to be torn apart in the same old way.


Going back to the assisted suicide story from yesterday can I just say that I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The law is quite clear on the matter and has been quite clear since 1961. No-one can give their consent to be killed by another be that person a doctor, a friend, a lover, a husband or a wife. Now if we can just get certain sections of society to accept that yes the law does apply to them too we might be able to move on as a society.

See choking to death IS official British Policy.

http://news.aol.co.uk/woman-loses-assisted-suicide-fight/article/20081028230325168503376

On a completely unrelated note last night I experienced yet another amazing coincidence as I went out to get something to eat. As I was standing there in the shop who happened to walk in but a guy I used to go to college with. It turns out that although he no longer lives in the area he's just been given a job with the local Croydon Council and wants to be my bestest, bestest friend.

In light of that event I should clarify something I said yesterday. When I said I wish they'd come down and talk I meant they should send somebody who has the power if not the authority to resolve the problems they themselves have created. For the time being this limits them too;

1. The doctor from the medical assessment centre who is going to certify my income support claim. The department of work and pensions may still feel that it is going to take them three to six months to complete that process but quite frankly it's only their own time they're wasting.
2. The firm of solicitors who have been charged with making sure my credit history is given a clean bill of health in spite of any misguided action any previous landlords may have undertaken.
3. The manager of Enterprise House who will be welcoming me back with open arms and be apologising for his previous errors of judgement.

Oh and there's something of a war going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I wonder if I'll be able to take an interest in it without the British Government taking it as an endorsement of it or it's policies. On a more local note the series of Spooks they filmed over the summer has finally limped onto our screens and it is already lying to you by claiming that it's really difficult to track someones movements on the London Underground network. I think this means that one of the main themes of the series will be an attempt to convince us all that the De Menezes shooting was not in any way shape or form a failure of the UK security services. On the plus side though Jo didn't die after all which means I've just won a bet.

I got another letter from my community mental health team today.

It appears they want me to fill in a questionnaire to help them re-shape mental health care with then UK. To me that sounds like a very noble undertaking and one I'd be very interested in getting involved in. The problem is before I do I want to see a single, simple condition fulfilled and the government would also like to see one condition fulfilled.

My condition is quite simple in that I, rather then a civil servant, want to be paid for the contribution I make. The governments condition is rather more complicated. They, to use their words, want me to disarm myself. In short they want me to stop this shockingly violent task of blogging.

They want me to stop this because blogging provides the mechanism I use to challenge the decisions the government makes based on the information I provide them with. Without this mechanism they would be free to play little tricks such as using any drugs I may or may not be on to minimise the effects of combat stress allowing them to extend the tours of duty of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, something which allows the generals and their political leaders to mitigate the effects that their poor strategy and leadership is having on those troops. They can also take my comments that people with mental health problems need structured recovery programs and use it as a justification for a welfare reform bill that mandates the mentally ill must get jobs. This is a policy that spits in the face of the principles of independent living and will have a dramatic and negative effect on the lives of thousands of people with mental health problems.

Why the government is having so much trouble meeting my condition is a total mystery to me but I'm sure the civil service will be able to provide an answer. Why I can't meet the governments condition is quite simple. If you provide the government with information without having any mechanism to control how they use that information you are not furthering society or helping your community escape the ghetto. You are simply allowing the entity that is holding society back to feast on your bones making the government stronger for the next time they want to inflict another war, another tax or another anti-terror bill on to your society.

I haven't decided if I'm going to return that questionnaire but as the people who sent it can't seem to grasp the basic principle of an either/or logic gate there seems little point trying to explain the finer points of the human condition to them.

On a related note I spoke to the Department of Work and Pensions today and they've confirmed that they have received my paper work and it is all in order. However they do seem to think that it will take them another three to six months to process that paper work. If I was a suspiciously minded person I would think that somebody was deliberately delaying the process in the hope that I would keep my nose clean while I'm waiting. Of course that tactic hasn't worked yet and I again did have to give them warning that the situation will not change until such a time as they change the situation. I just wish they'd be more open to discuss the matter because then they'd realise they don't have half the problems they think they do.

Is the BBC News feeling a little unwell?

Normally I quite like the BBC news because they adhere to very high standards of fairness and accuracy. Of course their role as Official State Broadcaster means that they have to give airtime to some hideous propaganda pieces but compared to their normal output these are so clunky and obvious they're easy to spot and ignore.

Recently though, with the economic downturn, I can't help but noticing their standards have slipped slightly. A case in point would be their coverage of Wednesday Prime Minister Questions. Gordon Brown used this weeks regular Q&A session to finally accept that the UK is heading into recession.

The BBC's flagship 10 o'clock News covered this by showing a short video tape of the speech in which Gordon Brown said;

"Having taken action on the banking system, we must now take action on the global financial recession. This is likely to cause recession in America, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and - because no country can insulate itself from it - Britain too."

The video tape was then cut short using a very sharp edit, allowing the program to cut back to the studio. Being in desperate need of a life I actually watched the entire speech live and saw that as Brown uttered the sentence "Because no country can insulate itself from it - Britain too" his fellow MP's responded by simply laughing in his face.

Another interesting aspect of the BBC's economic coverage is that rather then been focusing on the UK economy they seem to be focusing on other countries economic problems. On Wednesday they talked at length about falls on the Russian stock market. Last night they announced with something close to glee that the economic downturn had also hit developing countries such as Argentina, Pakistan and South Korea as if somehow the fact that Argentinians were poorer would somehow make Britain's poverty more bearable. The centrepiece of the report was that the value of South Korea's currency had dropped by a staggering 30% over the last three months. Of course what the report failed to mention was that the UK's currency had also lost about 25% of it's value.

It's almost as if the economic situation has got so bad that the BBC have given up reporting the news and have just started trying to convince the country as a whole that everything going to be OK and there's no need to worry. It's stating to remind me of the day the Iraq war began and my city responded by collectively going on strike, shutting down road and rail links, trashing the town hall and suddenly finding itself able to send the police into retreat by simply coughing in their general direction. Of course the big story on the local news that night was that a local animal rescue shelter had just seen the birth of a litter of fluffy puppies.

Bloody hell I knew the economic downturn was going to hit Britain particularly hard but I didn't think it was bad enough to shake the state to it's very foundations.

Man, Stupid is as Stupid Does.

Having a unshakable belief that the British State is both competent and has it's citizens best interests at heart my father is quite clearly an idiot. The evidence of his idiocy is so clear and manifold that it makes my every waking moment a constant battle to avoid stabbing him in the eye with a fork. Chief amongst his imbecilities though is that every time a dialog box pops up on his computer screen asking the simple question "Would you like to download the following software?" he is both mentally and physically incapable of clicking on the "No" button. This means that our shared PC rarely operates without the full complement of Google taskbars, Yahoo Taskbars, Microsoft taskbars and every other taskbar you can imagine. As nobody actually uses these background programs they serve no other purpose then to run on the system sucking up memory and processing power.

About 18 months ago, on one of my frequent trips to remove these vampire programs, I discovered that my PC had a virus on it but not any old virus. This virus was bespoke, having been designed specifically for that PC, meaning that it couldn't be detected by any off the shelf anti-virus software. Not only that but it had actually been specifically designed to nest itself within the Norton anti-virus software which I actually thought was quite clever. Obviously on discovering it I would have deleted this mal-ware straight away but it also had written into it a defense mechanism that meant any attempt to delete it or it's host programs would trigger it to attack the registry destroying those bits of software that told the PC that it was a PC. Since then anyone who has used the machine have been told in no uncertain terms not to touch Norton or they will destroy the computer.

Last night my father had the bright idea that he was going to update the computers security by first deleting the Norton anti-virus package. Obviously this triggered the defence mechanism, wiping the registry so now my home PC thinks it's a nest of occasional tables and I'm sitting here in an Internet cafe.

If this current system shutdown was a deliberate attempt to stop me talking about Zimbabwe, the economy, the defeat of the anti-terror bill or the legal action Iceland have started against the UK government I wouldn't mind that much, mainly because it clearly hasn't worked but there is no conspiracy here. The offending virus has been sitting on my PC for months like an unexploded bomb waiting for someone dumb enough to come forward and hit it with a shovel. Step forward my dad, what a plum!

It is a bit annoying though because I was planning to spend the day looking into the details of the apparent deadlock in the Zimbabwe power sharing agreement and possibly build up a portfolio of the more impressive torture photos so I could send it to my favorite charity just to remind them of the stakes of the game they seem to think they're players in.

The US Presidental Election

Although this is one of the two most serious issues in the world today I have yet to comment on it fully. In the late stages of the Democratic leadership campaign I supported Barack Obama over Hilary Clinton. This was not so much a vote in favour of Obama as much as a vote against Clinton because here in the UK we've endured her particular brand of quasi-socialist, quasi-feminist, idiot in a power suit nonsense for more then a decade and trust me when I tell you that there is no greater insult you can inflict on a nation.

Which McCain already chosen by the Republicans Obama's nomination left a straight fight between two candidates that I didn't know that much about. Based on what I did know we had;

Barack Obama; A fresh, young intelligent candidate from the new school of left wing politics. Personally I found his connection to certain radical figures to be something of a plus because if you are to elect a left-wing president you want a candidate who is of the hard left rather then a conservative with a bleeding heart of will waste billions of dollars on whatever the latest liberal cause celebre of the week happens to be.

Although clearly not a Muslim Obama has, in part, been raised in Muslims countries amongst Islamic cultures and traditions. Far from being a threat I think that while America's foreign policy is dominated by wars against Islamic terrorism this experience would be a definite advantage because in order to defeat an enemy you must first be able to truly understand them.

The main concern I have about Obama is his lack of experience. He has only been in national politics for two years and seems to rely to heavily on his youth and the unique selling point of his race to dominate the political discourse. Hell he even needed a little help to get his parties nomination. This is no minor concern because the world of national and international politics is a rough place and you can have all the best ideas about terrorism, the environment or health care but they will count for nothing unless you have the ability to put them into action.

John McCain; McCain has always struck me as something of a practical Republican. That is to say he will look at the problem in front of him and find a solution that will work even if that solution happens to go against his own political beliefs. This is a definite advantage because the challenges faced by the President of the United States are complicated enough without trying to impose some sort of political dogma on them.

The other thing I like about McCain is his military record. You may not like the military and you may not like war but anybody who has served in the military let alone spent five years in a POW camp is a very strong character who understands the military and the way it works. With America at war on two fronts and the world being far from a peaceful place this experience will be invaluable. McCain showed his strength on the subject with his plan for the Iraq Surge. Although controversial because of it's cost in American lives this plan was undoubtedly the right thing to do because it took a very bad situation and made it a hell of a lot better.

I have two main concerns about McCain is his age. This is no cheap shot because at the time of the next Presidential election he will be 76 and that is old by anyone's measure and president is without doubt one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs there are however I'm sure the Republican party wouldn't be running him unless they were sure about his health. The other concern I have about McCain is that at a military man he will, at times of stress, revert to his training and seek a military solution when a diplomatic one may be more appropriate.


With the two very strong candidates facing up against each other I was then looking forward to a presidential campaign which would test them both and show America at it's best. Sadly events and the Brits conspired to rob us of that and we were left with a far messier campaign with two key features.


Sarah Palin as Vice President; Faced with the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the Obama campaign the McCain camp assumed they were going to have a tough time winning the Whitehouse. In response they came up with a masterstroke by choosing Sarah Palin. As the Vice Presidents job is essentially to sit around secretly hoping that the president gets shot Ms Palin's political experience or lack there of isn't really an issue. What she brings to the Republican ticket is image and her image of a home-spun, gun loving, God fearing, anti-abortion hockey mom appeals to the core Republican supporters who fell that McCain is too liberal. The Republican campaign was also hoping that some of the more colourful elements of Ms Palin's image such as the names of her children and how they spend their free time, her policy on rape kits, her Miss Alaska title and her hypocrisy over the Alaskan jet would cause the Democrats to fall about laughing and launch a series of personal attacks against her. This display of venom and vitriol would paint the Democrats campaign as the party of the angry black man turning off the undecided voters of middle America against them.

This plan was nothing short of brilliant. It was so good in fact I couldn't help myself to reward it by playing along with it for a bit. The only week point was that certain elements of the plan relied heavily on some very poor intelligence provided by the Brits but I think the Republican campaign have already learnt their lesson.

The Economic Crisis; Putting presidential debates, VP, environmental concerns and even wars in the shade this crisis is without doubt the defining issue of the campaign because how the current President and the next President responds to it will have more impact on more Americans then most of the others combined.

It is in their response to the crisis that a clear division emerged between the candidates. Barack Obama appeared not to understand the severity of the situation and more or less chose to ignore it carrying on with his campaign and treating a major threat to the US as little more then an opportunity to score cheap political points of his opponent before smiling and heading off to the next photo-opportunity.

John McCain on the other hand took decisive action and cancelled his presidential campaign . This caused him to be vilified by the Democrats and the media and may well prove to be the decision that saved the economy but cost him the Presidency. It was though the sort of action that was needed because it caused the media, congress and the American public to focus on the problem and pass the rescue package that will begin to solve America's economic problems. To me that is the mark of a leader.

Who would I vote for? Although I like Obama, because he has lots of good ideas and I'm sure he will make a good president one day, he lacks the experience to put those ideas into action and he lacks the strength of character to face America and the worlds challenges. McCain on the other hand also has a lot of good ideas and the sense to listen to others opinions. He also has the experience and ability to turn round Americas fortunes.

So for me it's McCain all the way for the simple reason he is the better candidate.

Team GB RIP?

Last Friday a tourniquet was tied round the worlds economy and a sticking plaster was applied to it's wounds. On Monday that plaster was torn off and the wound was found to be healing nicely.

On Tuesday, in the UK, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Prime Minister and the head of the Bank on England, being a little behind the times met to draw up a plan to calm the UK financial system. This morning they announced they had come up with a £450bn ($900bn) plan, the main points of which are;

• An extra £150bn to be injected into the markets.
• An extra £250bn for a scheme which insures the value of banks debts
• A minimum of £50bn to buy high priority shares in UK banks.

Although the first two points are the most expensive together exceeding the value of the US rescue package they are simply injecting capital into the markets without addressing why the markets are short of capital in the first place. This is something Bank of England and other central banks have done over a dozen times over the course of the financial crisis and is sadly necessary.

The third point however is the most dangerous element of the plan because it will see the UK Government become part owner of eight of the UK's private, high street banks. Not only will this part nationalisation of the entire UK banking industry see the Government as the most powerful shareholder in the banks it will also impose some draconian controls on those banks activities including a cap on executives pay, putting the government first in line for any dividend payouts, a limit on the dividends that will be paid to other shareholders and an undertaking to issue mortgages and loans that make little economic sense.

The UK is the only government in the world that is following this path of seizing control over private enterprise and these restrictions make no commercial or economic sense. Instead they have been drawn up for political reasons to centralize control of the UK economy around the Treasury and allow politicians to pretend they are "protecting the interests of UK taxpayers" when in fact they are doing completely the opposite.

When the global economy recovers Britain will find itself out of step with the rest of the world and in control of economy which is expected to shrink at least 4% in the next year alone. This idiocy should come as no surprise from a Prime Minister who seems to believe that guaranteed failure is a less risky option then a possible success.

Sir Ian Blair's Resignation.

Last Thursday October 2nd the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair resigned. Although tedious this resignation is quite important because from his position at Scotland Yard the Met police commissioner is responsible for policing of London, a city of 8 million people. He is also responsible for elements of national policing including the anti-terrorist command, National Extremism Tactical Command Unit (NECTU), special branch and the riot squad. He is also, on paper at least, in charge of those blasted helicopters.

Hard as it may be for some of you to believe I actually have quite a lot of respect for the British police, the met especially. Not all of them obviously because London has 35,000 officers alone and some of them are bound to be bastards but generally from Inspector level upwards they tend to be quite reliable. They swear allegiance to the crown regardless of who may be wearing it and enforce the laws of the land as they are written. Of course these laws are written by politicians and are often unfair, ill-conceived and some are just plain wrong but the police pursue all those who break them be they communists, fascists, politicians or spooks. If you are to have a police force that is how you want it to operate otherwise you end up with a situation like you have in Brazil where corrupt officers only enforce the laws they want and kill around 300 innocent civilians a year but more of that later. Sir Ian Blair very much encapsulated that attitude to policing as evidenced by an interview he did for Time Magazine in which he said;

"Modern policing is a lot like standing on the banks of a fast flowing river watching the bodies float past. As a policeman you can either spend all day trying to fish those bodies out or you can walk upstream to find out who's dumping those bodies in. If you do that you may find that you have to walk very far upstream."

Standing by those words one of Blair's first actions on taking up the job was to tackle the culture of institutional racism that exists in the Metropolitan Police and increase the number of officers from Black and ethnic minorities. In a force that was at the time made up of 97% white officers many of whom can only be described as something of societies problem children this sort of behaviour was never going to make the new commissioner popular.

The next very controversial event of the Blairs career was the Cash for Honours scandal. This was an investigation to see if Senior Labour MP's upto and including the then Prime Minister had seriously broken constitutional law by exchanging seats in the upper house of Parliament (House of Lords) for cash donations to the party election campaign. This very long investigation saw a number of key Labour party officials interviewed under caution and raised the possibility we would see the Prime minister leave office in handcuffs. It was around this time that Sir Ian started to encounter a run off bad luck the most well publicised of these was the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

Following the failed suicide bombings of July 2005 a police anti-terrorist team followed a man onto an underground train and shot him dead believing him to be one of the terrorists. As the news broke the commissioner asked the officers directly in charge of the operation what had happened. In order to cover their own backs these officers told Blair that they had killed a terrorist who was just about to carry out an attack even though they knew full well that they'd killed an innocent civilian. Blair then called a press conference and repeated this story to the media causing him much embarrassment when it was proved to be a tissue of lies. This betrayal didn't stop Blair attempting to protect his officers by fighting the ensuing health and Safety prosecution. The inquest into the death opened last month and is still on going.

The next embarrassment came when a senior Asian officer, Commander Shabir Hussain alleged that he was being held back from promotion because Ian Blair was a racist and wanted to maintain an inner circle of exclusively white officers. The unsupported racism claim was repeated by Tarique Ghaffur who considered taking the Met police and Sir Ian Blair to an employment tribunal after he was not put in charge of the security operation for the 2012 Olympics.

Sir Ian also found himself in controversy in many smaller scandals including but not limited to recording telephone conversations during the cash for honours inquiry, awarding police contracts to an IT company and a PR companies which where owned by friend of Blair's and suggesting that the British Press rate white victims of crime more highly then black ones.

The final straw came last week when the London Mayor informed Blair that he did not have his backing in the role of Police Commissioner these along with all the other pressure caused Sir Ian to utter the immortal phrase; "Sod this. I'm not getting paid enough to put up with this crap." and resigned. This resignation will take effect in December when Blair will be replaced by another commissioner who has already been moulded into the ways of the police. This means they ill hate me on principle and when I run rings round them they will hate me even more so some things never really change.

The most amusing part of the whole affair was Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith attacked Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson of engaging in a political plot to oust Sir Ian when that's exactly what she's been doing for much much longer then Boris had been in office. This display of shameless opportunism rather then ability probably explains how she managed to survive the latest cabinet re-shuffle.

The US economy

On Friday the House of Representatives eventually passed Bush's economic rescue package. Now a full two days later I finally get round tp commenting on it and many of the things I'm about to say have already been said and I apologise for that but you have to remember I live in the UK which feels a lot like having to go through life dragging the bloated corpse of a long dead Siamese twin.

The most important thing you have to understand about this rescue package is that it is not a magic bullet or a quick fix. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have described it as a tourniquet that will stop the bleeding but not heal the cut and all commentators have desperately tried to avoid the arrogance of plagiarising Winston Churchill's famous wartime speech in which he said;

"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning to the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

But that comparison is apt if a little over dramatic because all this rescue package has done is solve the banking problem which has been the downward spiral driving America's economic problems. This solution will take 8 - 10 months to have an effect on Wall Street and it will then take another year or so for those effects to be felt on Main Street. In the mean time there still will be a recession, manufacturing and productivity will still decline, people will continue to lose their jobs and people will continue to lose their homes but things will get better.

The difference this rescue package will make is the difference between people hurting 10% and people hurting 90%. Sadly some people will still hurt 100% but the only real question I have about the package is why Congress didn't pass it this time last year.

In UK news I do need to go back to yesterday and point out that although £1.1trillion has flowed out of the British economy no individual in the UK has actually lost any money. All that's happened is that money that used to be deposited with the Bank of England is now deposited with other national banks. If you want to avoid the problem all you need to do is nip down to the Post Office and open one of their tax free savings accounts with a 100% deposit guarantee and 6.25% savings rate. Alternatively you could go with Northern Rock and it's 6% while you try and dream up new reasons to convince yourself that the British State still has an opinion worth listening too.

Now no-one likes to see a failed state sulk.

Over the last week amid the flood of stories about suicide, assisted suicide, rapist this and paedophile that there is one tiny, insignificant economic story that the UK media somehow failed to report on.

In response to Britain's attempt to create a two-tier protectionist economy by seizing private banks and then offering 100% savings guarantees to the customers of those newly nationalised banks the Irish government went one step further and offered 100% savings guarantees to all customers of all it's private banks including those that operate within the UK.

As a result some £1.1trillion ($2.2trillion) of capital flowed out of the UK economy. Now the UK government has started to pout by calling an emergency meeting of EU leaders in the hope that they can get Ireland's decision ruled illegal for breaching competition rules and distorting the market place. I can only presume that Britain is doing this because they were operating under the impression that they were the only ones who were allowed to suspend European competition rules, offer 100% savings guarantees and distort the European financial markets in their favour.

It has been a very busy week and there is plenty more to come about the US economy, the US election, the UK economy, the UK cabinet reshuffle and the resignation of London Metropolitan police commissioner but with 105% of GDP wiped of the UK economy may I be the first to say;

"Oh dear children, that cure for cancer is starting to look mighty expensive."

Gordon Brown and the New Feudalism.

Here in the UK we have been quite busy politically with the US presidential election and the US economic crisis. On top of that we've had the UK economic crisis, the national conventions of the three main political parties, the introduction of ID cards and are looking forward to the state opening of Parliament in November which should feature the most controversial Queens speech since Guy Fawkes.

Some of you have been able to cut through this chaos and realise that I have a special interest in seeing the US economic recovery package carried out successfully. Those people are correct if unable to identify my my motivation. In order to explain this I need to give everyone a sub GCSE economics lesson.

Macro-economic Controls.

In the UK any private bank like Lloyds, HSBC, Barclay's, Natwest etc must first hold an account with the central, national bank called the Bank of England (BOE). As with any private bank account the account with the BOE allows a private bank to deposit the money it gains from it's operations and borrow money for any of it's future operations. This loan facility gives the BOE and it's governmental backers something called a macro-economic control mechanism in the form of interest rates. These interest rates get in the news on pretty much a monthly basis as the heads of the BOE meet to discuss what level they should be set at.
If the government wants to have less money available in the UK economy they simply raise these interest rates forcing your bank to in turn raise your mortgage rate increasing your monthly repayments and leaving you with less money in your pocket. Conversely if the government wants more money in the economy they simply cut those interest rates with the opposite effect.

A Little Bit of History.

In the olden days when the landed gentry rode black horses through their fields, the poor died young in dirty factories and everybody knew their place this system worked very well, for the landed gentry at least.

Then in the early 1980's an uppity Prime Minister came along and de-regulated the financial services industry leading to an explosion of wealth and productivity. This event was known as The Big Bang! and the comparison with the creation of a new universe was not overstated because over the next ten to fifteen years the changes were dramatic and wide reaching. Britons were allowed electricity in their homes 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Millions were allowed to own their own homes for the first time ever. Money suddenly became available to develop new sciences and technologies. A generation grew up able to stay in education up to university and beyond. Women were finally allowed to fully enter the workplace and if the government were that way inclined there would have been billions available to spend on our health service. Most importantly some of the private banks became so rich that they were able to absorb any changes in the BOE's interest rates without passing them on to their customers.

You would think this new world of opportunity and prosperity would make everybody happy and it did. Everybody that is except for the UK civil service who hated it and hated it with a passion.. Partly they hated it because it went against their departmental policy of managed decline - running down the UK at a such a slow and gentle rate it's citizens don't really notice. Partly they hated it because this new universe was too big and complicated for the diseased little minds to cope with but mainly they hated it because it meant they were no longer able to dictate who in the UK would be rich and who in the UK would be poor.

For nearly twenty years they sat and seethed quietly plotting a day when they would be able to once again convince themselves they're the cleverest people in the country. In the election of Gordon Brown, an old school socialist Prime Minister with a seemingly psychotic desire to control every aspect of his citizens lives, as leader of the Labour party which spent ten years losing to Thatcher's Conservative party the civil service found an unwitting ally for their plotting.

The Big Bang Project.

As the credit crunch started to bite Britain's government started nationalising banks. This started in January 2008 when Northern Rock and its 10% of the UK mortgage market came directly under state control. This weekend Bradford & Bingley with it's 6% of the mortgage market met the same fate and came under the control of the government.


The most interesting of the UK bank takeovers came just as Sarah Palin announced that Bristol would be keeping her baby, Croydons trams crashed while a delegation form the French government were inspecting the system, my grandmother was in hospital, the channel tunnel caught fire and the Large Hadron Collider fired up hoping to re-create the big bang. Here Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) with it's massive 20% of the UK mortgage market was brought out by Lloyds-TSB in a deal so large it actually needed the government to waive competition laws to allow it to happen.

Apart from it's sheer size the deal also raised eyebrows because nobody could quite figure out just why HBOS was in so much trouble. After all it was safe bank with a very large book of good mortgages backed up by a large base of deposits. In fact the only risk that HBOS appeared to be exposed to was that it had recently been caught trying to pay my grandmothers gas bill for her so everybody thought that it would be next on the chopping block to sate the state seemingly never ending blood lust.

Suddenly their cash flow dried up and within a week they were swallowed up by Lloyds-TSB a much smaller bank with an 8% share of the UK mortgage market. Like Barclay's bank Lloyds has long been a loyal part of the UK establishment and is the bank my father has used all his working life.

The Result.

With around 60% of mortgages in the UK either directly or indirectly under central government control the governments economic control mechanism is backin full force and it has become clear that the UK's response to the credit crunch was to panic and nationalise everything in effect withdrawing from the global economic system. This is very bad news for the UK because the financial service industry is very much the goose that lays the economies golden egg beign one of the largest and most porfitable industry.

The one thing the UK Treasury were hoping would mitigate the negative effects of their tactic admission of failure was that amid all the chaos and confusion the deadlocked US senate, which the UK helped to produce, would either fail to pass a solution or would only pass a solution that involved massive amounts of government intervention and reams of needless market regulation frog marching America down the road of socialist intervention and dragging it down to the UK's very low level.

What they didn't count on though was that the US Treasury with it's greater finesse and understanding of micro-economics would come up with a relatively cheap and simple solution that would end the economic decline with the barest minimum of government intervention. If that solution is implemented it will be incredibly bad news for Britain, very good news for the United States. It will also be amazing news for me because it will just reinforce the fact that all those UK agents who've caused me so much trouble are really doing is racing each other to climb to the top of the shit pile.

So there you have it. I have a vested interest in seeing this recovery package passing and I have a vested interest in seeing successfully improve the US economy but then why should you believe me after all the Brits have been leading a year long operation to convince you that I am your worst enemy.