Going For Broke

The United Kingdom, perhaps once Great Britain both as a whole and in terms of its constituent parts is not marching out of history but more scuffling down the back entry doing a moonlight flit because it can no longer pay the rent.

It cannot take the furniture, because that was securitised to its creditors.  The bed linen was worn out, the artefacts broken or useless and much of the clothing only good for turning into dusters.

It is taking a bag of money with it.  But this is risky; it is all counterfeit because for sometime the UK has been going round offering to take dud coins and notes off the neighbour's hands for a small price.

This is a way to go from The Enlightened Economist who refers to a book about Detroit and how it prefigures post industrial economies.  For her it is all about trust and how that is the key to a functioning and growing economy.

There is little of it about these days and when the threshold is crossed on the down turn then it all goes bad, very bad.  Our Irish neighbour, for example, was doing well as a bookies runner but the bookie went bust and he is left with the liabilities.

In London, where some of them operated and went broke, fake money now abounds and the property owners have made full use of it.  Scotland tried to detach from London, but is now semi-detached and about to tax property.

The naysayers are in full flow and the dissenting preachers telling us all that we are all doomed, apart from a select few who made the right money calls.  Now even the voters are listening to them.

In May, we are invited to put our trust in another government.  This is likely to be a party that at best has the vote of only a third of the actual electorate and likely to pursue policies opposed to the wishes of around three quarters of us.

The one certainty is that there is no certainty about the way economies, finance, oil, gas, water and a lot of other things are going to go and the brutal realisation that trust is not just in short supply, it might now be drying up completely.

As trust departs so does belief and so do other things.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

As far as possible I have avoided the smoking versus non smoking debate.  There are times, however, when despite the evidence on health and effects the anti-smoking case seems to lose the plot, literally in this case.

Perhaps, given the nature of the story below, if not shooting then at least stabbing yourself in the foot.

This sorry tale of stupidity comes from Western Australia where one can only assume that either the heat got to them or someone was bitten by a rabid dingo.  Are they even half aware of the story line?

The lead character, a promiscuous and dangerous person at the end is brutally stabbed to death by the former lover she left.  He in turn is destined for the firing squad because he deserted from the Army to chase after her.

This occurs at a stadium which is for bull fighting, where cruelty to animals goes along with the risk of dreadful death for the men taunting the bull.  All this is enmeshed with the tobacco industry as she and her fellow girls work in cigar or cigarette factory.

They in turn are loose living and are associated with a group of thieves, murderers and smugglers of forbidden substances.  It may look like fun on stage but it is evident that they are in for a short life and to a great extent a hard one.  Treachery and deceit are their life.

In a sense this is history.  The original story on which the opera is based is said to have been, if loosely, factual.  It is not far removed from what did and could happen in the Spain of that period.  Life was often nasty, brutish and short.

In the meantime, the old Gallagher factory at Ballymena in County Antrim is to close, with over 800 jobs lost, a blow to the local economy.  The news item said this was the last British tobacco factory.

This was once a substantial industry.  Now it is imported at some cost but the taxes on tobacco are still an item in the Treasury revenues, despite the scale of the bootleg traffic along the M20 and M2.

For generations smoking was a norm and even seen as a social necessity.  It may be that the age of smoking is ending and will soon be gone and perhaps the difficult issues with it.

But a problem now is that we have replaced it with worse ones.

Troop Movements

It is my view that we should not send troops to Iraq or Syria.  We do not have the numbers to take part in an extensive or prolonged campaign.

We do not have the logistical capability to maintain the levels of support and supply necessary.

We do not have a political governance that either understands what is involved nor able to deal with the inevitable difficulties.

Also, the west has been here before time and again.  This time round the French are likely to go AWOL.

The world has changed.

Getting A Move On

The debate on immigration into the UK veers between ancient prejudices of one kind or another, waffle and several types of idealism untroubled by the facts or history.  The latest example is Vince Cable's oration to the Liberal Democrat conference telling us it is for our own good and how we all will be happier for it.

First look around the figures and spend a little time picking out various nations around the world but look at a number of them, especially those with larger populations in Africa and The East.  You will see that many with much larger populations than the UK have doubled or trebled their populations in the last fifty years.

People do move, perhaps all of us are the products of complex movements of our ancestors in the relatively recent past both within and between nations.  If I go back to around 1800 there is a scatter of mine across the whole of the Atlantic Isles.

A lot were part of what amounted to large scale migration from across the uplands especially and other rural areas of all parts of Isles as subsistence economies collapsed because of adverse conditions and pressure of population growth generally.

This was compounded later by the Great Agricultural Depression that began in the late 19th Century and lasted until the 1940's.  Some was smaller scale.  Younger sons or daughters having to move on to other places.  Employment ambitions, military service, the attractions of towns or cities or just to get away from a village with a tiresome laird or squire.

What too many of the comfortable theorists and others do not see is that around the world the pre-conditions are in place for extensive large scale movement.  In fact it has already begun in many small ways and for the usual reasons and the real questions are how big and how fast is it going to be.

Just as in the past people moved on a large scale to where the options seemed better and to where they could either enforce their presence or just take advantage of divided or complacent existing populations.

A key question is the balance between incoming and outgoing numbers.  If the difference is marginal it is one situation.  But if large countries have increased numbers going out then while the numbers may be a small proportion for that country, it will be a larger proportion for the smaller countries that receive them to one degree or another.

What is more is that if a lot of larger countries lose what is apparently a small proportion of each of their populations if those outgoings are concentrated as incomers in only a few smaller countries what may be low level for the big becomes large scale to the small, in some cases almost mass migration.

As far as the UK is concerned we have strong links to the old Empire and this includes many places with fast rising populations which are generating increasing numbers of outgoing people.  They are losing small proportions, we are getting higher and increasing proportions as families or even tribal groups move.

We have added to this the European dimension and others from beyond these places.  Many have come and more are on the way.  With them often come their young for education, their old for the benefits and their sick for treatment.  Those who work in turn will hope for access to our social security provision and housing.

The breezy assumption that this necessarily mean economic growth is true only in the sense that more population means more money shifting around in gross terms.  In other terms the effect can be to reduce real earnings per head and create added costs in social and housing provision.  Many will work for low wages that in turn add to the demands.

We are being told in the run up to the elections that there are great problems to be solved across whole sectors of the economy and in public services and the politicians are playing the blame games.  Yet the election is likely to deliver what will be a no change system.

Is it already too late?

Mining The Past

There is a new film on release, information around the web, called "Pride", the story line being of gays etc offering donations and help to the miners during the strike of 1984-1985.

It is said that the National Union of Mineworkers, the NUM, then led by Arthur Scargill, were a little reluctant to take the money publicly so the gays went to Wales to deliver it in person.

Possibly, this was because the Welsh were politer, more tolerant and willing to embrace all those who helped them.  More likely it was because in South Yorkshire the reception would have been distinctly frosty.

Another matter was that in Wales it was probable that the money will have gone to struggling miners' families.  It was patchy overall, but in some areas little was passed on.

Apart from all this the basis for the story is what is now the received history of the Miners' Strike, largely the version given by the Left and its associates.  It is a pity that the real story has never emerged.

It began with a cock-up, the usual kind and one that many of us are familiar with.  Essentially, a couple of muddling Alpha males in the wrong place at the wrong time acting in haste and unwilling to admit error.

In the area of South Yorkshire in question, the Cortonwood Colliery was one of many older pits, close to each other, that had been worked for some time and much of the good and profitable coal had been extracted.

It was routine for the National Coal Board in these cases via their regional offices to come up with options for future workings.  Some shafts would close, sometimes a new one would open and sometimes seams would be worked from another adjacent shaft in a merger of collieries.

This was the case at Cortonwood and the NCB were bound to consult and discuss the matter with the union at a colliery to come to arrangements for the deployment of men and the relevant details of future workings.

But the union man at Cortonwood was also a long standing local politician. He liked to keep things to himself and was reluctant to make concessions.  So, he was indecisive but liked to be in charge but delayed and distorted issues and distanced himself from anything difficult.

More to the point was that he lived only streets away from Arthur, who was a friend and regular contact and whose offices were yards from the local Council offices.  They had known each other for years.

After some time struggling to get answers from the local union man; any response as to what might or might not be done about the increasing and dangerous difficulties at Cortonwood the local NCB decided on a merger, soon.

Effectively this meant the end of the Cortonwood shaft, but some work going to the neighbouring pit down the road.  When the final offer was made, the union man realised that not only had he blundered but he had lost his personal power base.

So he was round the corner to Arthur like a shot.  Both then and in later years the perception of the NUM was that it was a monolithic organisation.  But like most organisations it had its divisions and dissents never mind the never ending rivalries.

As recently arrived President, Arthur was affected by all this as well as other pressures.  The NUM had a creaking and old fashioned administration and an organisation of the past which led to difficulties in the formulation of policy.

He wanted to stamp his authority over the fractious and overly sensitive senior officials and to use the potential power and national standing of the leadership of his union.  Here was a cause in his own back yard, literally, and he could not ignore it.

The NUM as a whole were blind to the mountains of surplus coal and associated slag heaps that had been created in Yorkshire and other places in the previous few years.  Locally they were called The Yorkshire Alps.

They were also blind to the fact that the senior ministers in the Thatcher government were unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the previous decades in dealing with NUM action.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Going To The Game

Sport is the opium of the masses, or so Murtagh Kavanagh, a leading philosopher now shunned, said of religion, a notion picked up by a follower, Karl Marx.  A consequence is that stadia for sports have now become modern cathedrals or almost holy places for the media worship of whoever doing whatever.

You are all paying whether you like it or not according to this item on the Mises Institute page.  This one concerns the USA chiefly the NFL, the American Football lot and major projects of recent years.  It is a huge amount of money for a few hours a week and very occasional major events.

Of course, those involved trundle out calculations to persuade us that the vast sums now involved are "investment", or necessary to well being or essential to economic growth and how's your father and many other things.  But the question lurks, what if the money was spent on other things?

Sixty or near years ago I had a bit of soccer coaching with others by the former captain of our local First Division club who had starred once in a Wembley Cup Final and had been close to an England place.  His earnings had been above average wages at the time but not by much and in retirement was running the family out of town grocery shop not many streets away.

The basic costs of that club then were regarded as large.  But now his successors are multi millionaires and the prices and running costs of their new stadia stratospheric.  It is very difficult to accept that the money flows in now give you any more joy from a good win.  They do make the losing though much more painful to the pocket.

But humans have been playing games in wasteful and inexplicable ways for a long time now.  Once in the ancient world games and contests were almost if not all part of the religious rituals of some civilisations.  Quite when in the western world games parted from religion is an academic question.  In our modern world though it seems to have replaced it.

My soccer coach was kind enough to tell me that soccer was not my game.  Basically, it was an attitude problem in that long before the ninety minutes were up the referee would have had more than enough.

Perhaps, I should have had more faith.

Europe, What Happens Next?

The EU cannot stay as it is.  It cannot revert to a previous form.  It cannot make any major readjustment to a smaller entity by expelling a number of problem members.  It cannot create its own army, air force or navy for defence and other things. It can only sprawl across Europe and stumble into an unknown and dangerous future.

Sixty years ago, the Federal Republic of Germany was within months of achieving full sovereignty and negotiating a new future for itself.  In parallel and support with this it was negotiating with France to establish the European Coal and Steel Community and by doing so place limitations in certain areas.

This was generally felt to be a good thing because it might at last stop them fighting each other, reduce the scope for economic conflict and help Europe begin to emerge from the wreckage of World War II which was still all too evident.

In the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the victorious powers were anxious to ensure that France was kept within its own borders and deterred from making wars again.  To that end Prussia, by now a formidable military power, was given lands on the Rhine to park its cavalry.

Two generations on this became The German Empire after the Prussians defeated France in 1870-71 with all that followed.  Then there was no going back and the balance of power became increasingly unbalanced.  Two more generations and two vicious wars led to Communism controlling the East and in the West the notion that Europe should be conjoined.

Now this Europe has become another quasi-Empire and has begun to meddle in the East, to conclude secretive treaties with the USA and attempt to control much of Africa on the quiet.  Created by democrats it is not democratic.  Intended to promote trade, growth and unity it is destroying it.  The peoples who hoped for peace and security of their own communities are finding themselves contending with forces out of their control or for that matter any of either their own governments or the EU.

The UK was persuaded to join the European project in the 1970's out of a belief that this would somehow solve the self inflicted economic problems.  Also, there was the utterly naive belief that because of our "special" relationship with the USA, a fantasy, and the world view of our Commonwealth, another fantasy, somehow we would be the new kingpins of Europe.

It is difficult enough to ride one horse, let alone two horses, but three horses is one too many, especially if you have neither the military nor economic power to do it.  Predictably, rather than being the king on the throne we were the king of the beggars at the gate.

We are now two generations on, more or less, since the EU began and we joined.  It is beginning to change radically and those in charge have little or no idea of what is going to happen or why.

I was there in 1950's Europe when it began and knew people who had lived and worked during the previous phase.  I am not optimistic.