gordon brown

 He really hasn't.

And I cannot wait to hear Clarkson's verdict on the dear leader "leading the celebrations"!  The pre-eminence of Britain in motor sport technology has absolutely nothing to do with him and his party who have conspired variously over the decades to destroy our motor industry completely.

Whether it's our Olympians, our Ashes winning cricketers or now Jenson Button and the Brawn team, I have this almost overpowering urge to vomit when I hear that "Gordon Brown has led the UK's celebrations of..."

I can only hope that Jenson and Ross have the good sense to refuse any invitation to a celebratory tea-party at number 10 with Gordon, Peter and Sarah.

There is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

I have long said it, but since the topic of who, if anyone, Lib Dems might do a deal with after a General Election has once again raised its ugly head, I will say it again - doing a deal with a Labour party having been given a good kicking, but just not quite a big enough one to allow the Tories to take control on their own would be a resignation issue for me.

It is not that I like the Tories, or Labour. I think the one is arrogant but incompetent, and I am not at all sure what he other stands for except that every time they get anywhere a bunch of dinosaurs appear and lurch to the right, whatever direction their leaders might want to portray the party as following. But to shore up this multiple war-mongering, civil liberties trashing, in-denial about the state's and their role in the worst financial crisis for decades, shower of shits would be unconscionable to me.

Nearly a hundred years ago it was Labour that managed to turn the "left" over to collective coercive socialism and away from liberal free-trading mutualism. Labopur is not liberal, and never will be, as Churchill nearly said (in fact he referred to socialism rather than the Labour Party for obvious reasons - it didn't exist). There would be no pride in achieving our long desired aim of electoral reform by deliberately doing more to discredit the current system than is presently obvious to many by so crassly contradicting the message the electorate would be sending - "we need change, but we're not quite sure what type".

I realize that the whole issue is more complicated than all this, which is why I would rather the party maintained strict neutrality and equidistance ahead of an election and did not give any signals ruling out any option.

When I was very young and just out of school and adding up the open positions in my chemicals pitch equities book on the Stock Exchange I once added instead of subtracting the figure in one column. As a result, my pitch was carrying what it thought was a whopping great open position in a particular stock just as people were trying to sell. It looked like that mistake would cost the partners of my firm a small fortune. Not something that could not be made back in a few days of lucky breaks, but a setback at least. I can live with that one.

But are there mistakes one could find it very difficult ever to reconcile one's conscience to?

Say, perhaps, you've been given the job of looking after the pennies for a newly elected government whose chance has come after nearly two decades in the political wilderness. You've made all sorts of promises, or your friends have at least. They've promised your expensive aspirations won't do anything to harm the overall health of an economy really just recovering from a previous upset.

Rocky times ensue in the big bad world. People, it turns out, don't really believe the hype about this newfangled interwebs thing and there's a stock market crash. You can see it might wipe a lot off the fortunes of some wealthy types and dampen the enthusiasm of everyone else for spending. You can see a situation where, before you have to ask the people to elect you again, you might have to defend yourself against the accusation that you failed in your promises, that within only four years you had managed to send the economy from booming to busting.

So you wonder what you can do. Oh yes, well if we tell our banker friends to lend more money to more people they'll have more in their pockets to spend and this little rocky patch won't turn into a recession. So you do. You instruct your best banker friend, George we'll call him for the sake of argument, to tell his banker friends to do exactly that, and you wait, and you watch. Brilliant! 2001 comes around and there's not been a recession, and not only that, but the value of everyone's homes is going up and people are feeling pretty good. So you go and ask them to give you another go an running the country and you win.

And then...you watch, you watch as hundreds of thousands, and then millions, the brightest, youngest folk in the land have to play catch up with the house prices that have risen so much because of your earlier decision. They get stretched because you have told them you've got rid of the idea of boom and bust and this upward trend is here to stay - it's good for us after all! They borrow more than they can reasonably afford, but you, and the banks, have to facilitate that for them because otherwise, well otherwise they'd miss the boat completely and be left renting for most of their lives.

For all those who really cannot get themselves a home of their own, well, you're spending money like water on schools and hospitals, telling them that because of your spending they will one day likely be able to catch up with the others. And with this little story, you ask the people to give you another turn at governing. And right at the top, while everyone's on a high, well, everyone except those Cassandra types at the IMF who say your housing market is out of control, your levels of personal debt are out of control, your friend gives you the big job and steps down.

Suddenly, some of your banker friends find out that your "bust" thing that you've supposedly abolished hasn't gone away at all. That there are lots of people to whom they have lent money to buy into your little Cinderella story who really just can't afford it. They get into trouble with their payments. Their houses aren't rising quite as fast as they were either because they were the very last people into this pyramid selling scheme and there's nobody else to lend to.

The whole house of cards starts to collapse. All the promises you made, [for prosperity] from the cradle to the grave, are on the edge, your best friends, the bankers, are squealing that you've left them exposed, so you have to give them some money to stop them from going away completely. And even after doing that, they still want to get all the money they've lent out back, and they start taking peoples' houses from them. The people you promised all this was forever. The ones you encouraged to get overstretched. The ones you were really elected to serve. They've paid out more than they should have done on the way up to stay in your little game and now are losing everything. Others are losing jobs because the bankers won't lend to anyone, even sound enough businesses.

Well, Gordon. I don't think I could live with that. I think I would need some mental health help. I would probably at least want to break down and say sorry to people. But no, you just simper and grin nervously, and blame America, blame anyone but the man who took the decision to go against what markets were telling him in 2000, go onto those same interwebs and shuffle about nervously as you tell the next generation that it was all someone else's fault and that you are the only person who can save them. If they'll only pledge to give you more of the money they have not even worked out yet how they are going to earn. All thanks to you.

Such is truly the attitude of the arrogant ego-mentalist sociopath. Why do we let them do it? What makes us believe that we need one person, or even 646 of them, to make us all happy and then find out they can't? Especially when we find out that they surround themselves with crooks, thieves and liers?  To preside over the ripping off of millions and then the complete destitution of millions more.

Just a quickie really. There is a lot of confusion in the non-wonk world about "PR". Of course there are two meanings for the "P" in "PR": "Preferential", in which candidates can be ranked and which tend to ensure that the one least out of favour with the most electors actually gets elected, which in itself has some good points - very few UK MPs and English & Welsh Councillors can claim to have the confidence of at least half their electors and this would give them that; and "Proportional", in which the aggregate votes across a number of candidates tend to result in a number of people being elected fairly closely related to the overall share of the vote a party gets - they have such a system in Northwrn Ireland and in Scotland for local government and, even on relatively small constituencies of three or four members seems to have produced a fairly proportional result in council chambers.

The apparent proposal due from Gordon Brown is to use "Alternative Vote" which is one of the purely Preferential types of PR, with no pretense to Proportionality at all. It has the advantage mentioned above of ensuring that in single member constituencies someone has to get 50% support and so, I suppose, is slightly better that being fed to alligators in a Florida swamp, but not by much.

However, given that a general election is less than a year away, assuming no attempt is made to invoke some of the Civil Contingency powers to grant Gordon permanent rule without parliament (which cannot be ruled out of course!), it would be impossible to rearrange constituencies in my opinion to accommodation my preferred method of multi-member "Single Transferrable Vote" which is the Scottish local government system and certainly not, God help us, any list based system, or even "AV+" in which the constituency is decided by Alternative Vote then some top up regional members are allocated according to the overall share of the vote for each party in all the constituencies in that region.

So, I would support the Alternative Vote suggestion for ONE ELECTION ONLY and with an automatic clause that after that the relevant body (is it the Boundary Commission any more or has it been subsumed into the Electoral Commission?) immediately begins to reform constituencies in preparation for STV the next time round. The primary legislation preparing for this should be included in any imminent Bill proposing Alternative Vote so there can be no doubt that it will happen.

If that cannot be achieved, then I agree with those who say that AV is too small a step which, once taken, may set back the cause of true reform for another decade, and we should not in such a case support it at all. We must secure a firm commitment to proper reform. It is the proportionality of the UK parliament that is all wrong. AV can make a small difference in that, but it can also have the opposite effect.

So, we're to get an Independent Regulator for MPs? Might I suggest the acronym "OffRAMP" - the Office of the Regulator of All Members of Parliament.

Does nobody else think this is a really bad idea. I'm sorry, we "elect" these people to run the country, to represent us in the High Court of Parliament. I realize they're looking a pretty untrustworthy bunch right now, but who, philosophically speaking, has the right to regulate or oversee those we theoretically put right there, at the top of the tree of government?

That they cannot, it seems, be trusted to regulate themselves says more about the political system than can be fixed by some kind of external regulator. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it:

"Free entry and competition is not always good. Competition in the production of goods is good, but competition in the production of bads is not. Free competition in killing, stealing, counterfeiting, or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. Yet this is precisely what is instituted by open political competition, i.e., democracy."

...in a good if probably unsuspected cause.

Most of you will probably realize that I regard the need for a military as one of the state's defining, and worst, features. States are made for war, and they have to have such bodies of their finest young men and women to do unquestioning their filthy work for them.*

I have had retired Gurkhas as security guards at my hall of residence for several years now. I am always both touched and embarrassed when I go down to take a walk around the site with them always to be addressed as "sir". I cannot imagine any of the other guards we have had doing so. They are the best guards we have had. They are reliably on time, and stay reliably till the end of the shift. I always know (for many years with other guards I didn't have such confidence) that if they come across an incident they will deal with it and that if they cannot, they will not just leave a student's concern or complaint unanswered and call us in if they need to.

Once upon a time these men I work with had fought it out, amongst their friends from their remote mountain villages, for the honour and privilege of being able to be sent away, cannon fodder for imperialist and post imperialist political egoists half a planet away. For two hundred years their villages have carried on what seems, to me, to be something of a mystifying tradition. They have fought, been feared as amongst the best, toughest soldiers in the world, for this jumped up belligerent little lump of rock of ours off the coast of north western Europe, and have died in their tens of thousands in our name.

In civilian life they are small only in stature. Their honesty, sense of respect, attention to duty, courtesy and loyalty are second to none. That is I am sure quite natural, but it is also, to them, the manifestation of what they consider to be "British". And boy do they do it a good deal better than many of the well-heeled native youth we come across wandering around off their heads, screaming and shouting and being abusive in the dead of the night who are to be, one presumes, our leaders of the future, once they graduate.

This weekend they are dumbfounded, to put it mildly, at the latest turn of events in the saga that has been the fight to allow some of their older comrades (mine all served post-97 I believe), the men whom they followed generation after generation from the top of the world to fight for this country, its people, its monarch and its self-serving politicians, to settle here.

Most of you will also know my outspoken views on immigration and border controls - that sharing the birthright of this planet we are all born onto, that freeing trade amongst all the nations of the world, means that people must be able to follow goods in freedom around the planet.

But for Fuck's Sake. If we do have to have borders. If we do have to try and stop people getting into this country, and I am prepared to be practical enough to realize that whilst open borders do not exist around the world and whilst many do not live in freedom and so are forced to try to escape their own tyrants we may well have to have some form of control, it should not be these people. These tough, loyal, courageous men who have done more for this country, with so little thanks, than so many even of our own have done or ever will do to deserve a living from our tax payments.

The Home Department, Secretary Jacqui Smith and Minister Phil Woolas should hang their heads in shame. For me, it would be fair justice if these men, inheritors of the heroes of the Western Front, of Sepoy, of Burma, of Borneo and Malaya, of Afghanistan and Iraq both now and ninety years ago and of many other battles in between, were to take matters into their own hands and turn their fighting talents to the walls and fences of Downing Street, and I'd hope that every last man and woman with a Queen's Commission or Shilling to their name would be right there behind them.

Our craven, cowardly, authoritarian, destructive, ungrateful, penny pinching, mealy mouthed, thieving, self-serving "representatives" would deserve everything they get.  Alas for us, these Gurkhas are too honourable to do our dirty work for us.  It is up to us to show this shitty spineless government the door, and preferably the inside of the cell beyond it.

*I am prepared to acknowledge that in this day and age much of what they do can be "humanitarian" in one form or another, but their need even in those situations would be lessened if it were not for other states at war.

...therefore it will not be accepted. No, we're not talking about Sir Fred's pension, but I do wonder how he plans to deal with California's ban on gay marriage:

Gordon Brown has condemned California's ban on gay marriage as "unacceptable" and warned people to be vigilant against all forms of discrimination. The prime minister said the ban, backed in a referendum in the US state in November, would "undo" much of recent progress made in tackling prejudice. [From BBC NEWS | Politics | Brown attacks US gay marriage ban]

What an extraordinary man!

Of course I think the ballot measure in November was wrong, was funded and campaigned for probably unfairly and definitely cynically, but what, for God's sake, does the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom have to do with it? Fucking hell - he can't even run a bank let alone someone else's referendum processes!

For all the bitterness that is being cooked up in the willy waving celebrity death match that is going on between Sir Fred Goodwin and Gordon Brown, an alternative view puts them on the same side of the bigger problem that faces the world. They are both symptoms of a modern (I think) trend of Messianic leadership; Fred on the corporate side and Gordon on the political side. And it's a problem that caused our current crisis - of ever more centralized leadership and a public willingness apparently to believe wholeheartedly in this cult.

When our political and corporate systems were designed, it was in a world of much more dispersed power in many ways. Sure, local fiefdoms are just as bad for ordinary folk as centralized ones, but the point is that discretion and innovation were much more dispersed.

I was reminded in a program about the monarchy I caught a little bit of yesterday that even today, when parliament is prorogued the announcement by Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh is made three or four days after the proclamation was signed and announced in Westminster as a tradition reflecting that it used to be a three day hard ride from Westminster to Edinburgh to deliver the proclamation.

Also a couple of years ago there was an auction sale of a collection of Sterling banknotes issued by the Bank of Chipping Norton, and even I remember as recently as when I made an ill-fated entry into the housing market in 1987 my bank manager had considerable discretion and he had to be more of a judge of character and less in thrall to the credit reference industry and head office micromanagement.

Bosses and political leaders do not have a monopoly on innovation or good judgement. And in fact, the greatest irony is that as communications make it much easier for us to collaborate (voluntarily co-operate for our mutual benefit) nowadays with individuals whom ten years ago we would probably never have known existed on the other side of the planet we have simultaneously vested more and more power in the centre with a tiny number of people.

When I started in the City in 1985 all but one I think of the Stock Exchange member firms were partnerships (Smith Brothers were just incorporating to form Smith New Court plc) with unlimited liability. Risk was managed well because each trading book (group of companies in which we traded in a single loose leaf ledger) had a partner overseeing it, every single day, who had a vested interest that his own stake in the business was not being overexposed. Not only that, but the partners responsible for each book and pitch would have built up an expertise in those companies, a network of market intelligence about them and so on. Indeed I remember a few days when partners met in the morning to change each book's allowable exposure level if, for example, one particular book had ended up over-exposed and the others had to compensate till the offending position had been unwound. Yes, we traded in options and futures but mostly if not all, purely in order to hedge open positions on the underlying stocks.

As Hywel Morgan points out at Lib Dem Voice the cult surrounding Gordon Brown seems to have reached something of a new peak yesterday as Harriet Harman proclaimed that "The prime minister has said that [Fred keeping his pension] is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted." However popular the government's position on Fred's millions may be in what Harman called the "court of public opinion" we are in a newly dangerous world if politicians take it to themselves to over-ride the rule of law.

We need to throw off our pusillanimous torpor, our willingness to accept this cult of leadership, and do so soon. How we come out of this brave new world post-meltdown depends on it.

It's no big secret that one of the things political Islam rails against the west for is what they consider to be its harram banking system based on debt/usury. Abu Hamza even said on a Newsnight one night (even Jeremy didn't really pick up on it at the time from memory) that attacks then being carried out against French banks were legitimate.

So, might I suggest that one way, if you really want to, to get back Sir Fred's pension and all those other bonuses would be to incarcerate them (and especially the politicians that egged them on in the "age of irresponsibility" as Brown christened his Chancellorship a few weeks ago) in Belmarsh and use recent suitable anti-terror laws to confiscate their assets.

After all, between them they have contrived to do more harm to our way of life (and for several decades to come even after ground zero is cleared up) than the Al Q'aeda big-wigs could probably have dreamed of.

We could even recycle GTMO for their exclusive pleasure - after all, it seems many of them like Caribbean hide-aways!

Of course, it's at least half-in-jest - but when we think of the damage that cock-up rather than conspiracy has wreaked on the global financial system and the billions so dependent on it, how much worse can it be? I remember Bjorn Lomberg once saying that providing a clean local water source for everyone on the planet currently without would have cost less than what we have put in to bail out these fuckers.

I'll bet it would change the entire popular view of "waterboarding" if it were Richard Fuld or today's favourite whipping boy Fred Goodwin undergoing it! Maybe "retired" bankers could even be the next group to get ID cards.