The Firebird - A Modern Take On An Old Fairy Tale From the Stravinsky Ballet

Once upon a time a Firebird lived in the depths of a dark, dank, dismal forest ruled by The Immortal Sorcerer Kashchei, aka Kostchei, (a banker), which was once The City of the land. The Tsar’s heir, Ivan, out hunting on his own, as heirs to the throne do in fairy tales, sees the Firebird. He thinks about shooting her (a hostile takeover) but ends up agreeing to a mutual trade (cartel), and she gives him a magic feather (derivative package). She flies off into the night, and then come along a Beautiful Tsarevna Princess (a desirable property) and her train of twelve enchanted Princesses (international subsidiaries). Ivan makes an approach (initial offer) and gives her a token (futures option) of his intent (subject to due diligence).

She and the other Princesses disappear, and a big hedge bars Ivan’s way (hedge funds have this effect), so he tries to get into the Castle that just happens to be there. Out come gangs of active predators and consultants who put him under administration, followed by Kashchei, who makes it clear he has a majority holding in all this. Ivan spits on the Sorcerer, causing Kashchei and his minions to go into a whirl of market activity each with a piece of the action in Ivan. Then Ivan remembers the feather, and waves it in the air.

The Firebird returns, the white knights having been enslaved by the Sorcerer, puts all of Kashchei’s subjects into a frenzied dance that results in them all falling asleep (light regulatory touch) along with the Princesses who have watched wondering what this will do their long term business plans. Ivan wanders back in, disbelieving and needing a new mission statement badly, so the Firebird points him to the source of Kashchei’s power in a box (offshore holdings).

Ivan opens the box, remember this is a ballet, not a TV show, and finds a large nest egg (private pension fund) that is at the bottom of the trouble. Clearly he has to do something (financial initiatives). So Ivan sends the nest egg as high as it can go, and when it drops and hits the floor it is smashed to pieces and Kashchei’s rule is ended.

There is a pause and then a glorious ending, with a magnificent glissando in the orchestra. Ivan and the Beautiful Tsarevna are brought together, and the Princesses are matched to Knights, now in Ivan’s service. All of Kashchei’s servants, before then oligarchs of The City are given back their former high status. The City is restored in full splendour, and there is a great parade of public sector employees giving tribute to the happy couple and joy is unbounded as Ivan has assumed control of all financial activity guaranteeing them their former wealth and more for time immemorial, or until the next performance.

If you like this story, then go to the UK No.10 gov website that is the Prime Minister’s, where you will find lots of other fairy tales to make you feel happy.

As for those who wish to see the ballet at the Westminster Comedy Warehouse, because of unforeseen circumstances the price of seats has risen rapidly, as will other costs, and will continue to do so until further notice. The touring company has met with a great acclaim in Washington DC.

The Big Four Or Perhaps Three

Robert Murphy, 0n http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/ has just posted to the effect that one or other of The Big Four may be on the ropes, and about to go the the Bailout Office. It this is possible then there are all sorts of implications, none of them nice.

Hyperinflation & The Hypermarket

It is alleged that the increase in spending of the Federal Government of the USA has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of borrowing it has to do to fund it, especially as tax revenues are decreasing. Inevitably, this has led to the bond yield curve in the markets rising to match the consequences. All this is very boring and technical stuff, much less fun than all the other media obsessions of the day, so I will not go into the rest of it, just to say we in the UK may have the same problem.

So I must remember to add to my shopping list a good stock of cartridges for my printer, as well as boxes of high quality paper. Because when I go shopping at some time in the foreseeable future, I may need to carry a great deal of paper with me, and my debit and credit cards will be no use at all. Perhaps it might be sensible to buy a couple of back up printers as well.

Cameron And Power To The People

In 1980 David Cameron was a callow teenager hanging around with the guys at Eton, softly singing to himself “The Winner Takes It All”, the Abba hit of the year. Doubtless, as teenagers fixated on celebrities are, he would have been affected by the tragic death of John Lennon. John, a lower middle class and grammar school boy grew up in a nice home on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, a large comfortable semi-detached property. At least it was in comparison with the accommodation available to the great majority of working class people at the time. Its inhabitants were said to be a snobby lot who had special toilet paper and not the ripped up Daily Mirrors and Sunday Pictorials we used. Life in Menlove Avenue was both warmer and better equipped than at Eton I suspect.

Inevitably, marketing considerations required The Beatles to create the myth of worker solidarity to help them become very rich and buy properties in tax havens. John famously said that “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg”, referring to his life changing experiences in the Red Light district of that town, where so many British Soldiers had surrendered to one or other Reeperbahn Rash in the years after the war. Hamburg originally had surrendered to a water truck driven by a Lance Corporal in 1945, but the next day repeated it to a coterie of more camera friendly troops with tanks and stuff. But Hamburg had its revenge, because in the next decade or so the ladies of the Reeperbahn inflicted an over ninety percent casualty rate on the British troops. This information probably is still classified, so you read it here first.

When both David and John were born, a generation apart, there was still a structure and form of government system in the United Kingdom which could be understood by the general population, and a legal system that had relative clarity and purpose. There was also coverage in national and the then extensive local press.

It began to go bad in the early 1970’s with the badly botched Heath reforms of local government and the health service. The disruption to management and the finance of services played a part in the severe inflation of the period and inevitably led to the decades of tinkering, shuffling, and fiddle. The commitment to the EU added to the mess, as did the creation of a raft of extra government bodies, and the never ending reorganisation of central government departments in the search for media coverage and to keep John Prescott out of mischief.

Mrs. Thatcher made an attempt to prune the Quango’s, but like vines and roses only to create the extensive growth of the last fifteen years. We all know what Blair and Brown have done. So we have a huge mess. After sixty years of interest and study on government and politics, I now have no working knowledge of either the law or just who administers what to what effect, or why. The documents I read are verbal sludge, and the intellectual structures on which law is based and decisions are made are roughly at the level of the playground of the old All Age Elementary Schools.

So David, my advice is, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here. The trouble is that if you do wish to give power to the people, they must have information, a media that is balanced, and an immediacy of access. This is not the way the media works at present and restoring local control will be harder to achieve than you imagine. The organisational challenge is immense, and you are not going to have either spare cash, or real growth to provide it. Worse still, you might have a rate of inflation that has to be firmly controlled to avoid a 1970’s problem or greater. As for the public relations, as things get difficult it may be nasty.

The pop and celebrity culture might suddenly see a market in pretending to be just very ordinary, especially if the tax man catches up with some of them and the screens will be filled with middle and lower middle class media poseurs waving their arms about demanding the return of Harriet, Jacqui, Hazel, Yvette and Caroline. The men will not be available. They will all be in Brussels, or Moscow, or with any luck in Walton Gaol.

Fiscal Policy And Old Mother Riley

As I have often used the term “Old Mother Riley Economics” it is time to explain what I mean. The heading might suggest that this blog has taken a turn for the deeply politically incorrect, but you need to know your Old Mother Riley from your Clark Gable to understand that it is not the case. The famous, and much loved, music hall turn of Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane made fifteen films in their time and could pack the local variety halls at the peak of their career. Arthur was Old Mother Riley, a cross dressing role where he played a difficult and unpredictable elderly washer woman who more or less always triumphed against men and her social superiors, and Kitty, who played the daughter, was the straight part.

Arthur and Kitty were married in real life and she ruled him with a rod of iron. I saw them live on stage a time or two, and part of the act was to relate to difficulties and hazards of the ordinary people, with the lack of money at the end of the week being a constant theme. This sketch I recall from the late 1940’s offered many people the most rational explanation of the economic policy of Sir Stafford Cripps at the time, and perhaps made more sense. They were concerned with the economics of reality but this sketch did not make it into any film, for obvious reasons given the period and the grip of the film censors.

OMR and Kitty are in their kitchen.

K - Mother, we haven’t any money and its only Tuesday.
OMR – I don’t know where it all goes.
K – You’ve been buying rum again.
OMR - I haven’t had a drop since Mafeking Night.
K – When was that?
OMR – Yesterday, oops, a long time ago.

K – How can we get some money for food, the light and the rent?
OMR – There is some washing to do.
K – Mother, its our own washing, how can we get paid to do that?
OMR – The man next door will give to me.
K – Why would he want to do that?
OMR (looking coy) – Well I make his tea for him when his wife’s out.
K – What does she think about that?
OMR advances down stage, flaps her skirts, leers at the audience, and says – She says it saves her all the trouble!
K – Oh mother, mother, exits.
OMR pours herself a cup of tea, takes a rum bottle from behind the sink, shakes her head and puts it back.

Knock on door, OMR says “Come in”, a small man with a large hat, which he removes to show he is bald, and carrying a notebook and satchel enters. He is the rent man, and everyone knows it. He tells OMR she is behind on the rent, and there is then a long diatribe of nonsense, at the end of which he demands the rent again. Another knock, another man, carrying a bucket, obviously the window cleaner, he wants his money, another comedy routine.

Another knock, another man, now the milkman, also wanting payment. OMR flaps about fussing, and while the men begin to argue with each other dips her hand into the satchel to take out some money. She then tells the men to line up, and goes to the milkman, puts money in his right hand, tells him to transfer it to his left, and pass it on to the window cleaner, who then passes it onto the rent man, who puts it into his satchel.

OMR now tells them they have all been paid and to get out. The rent man looks in his satchel and realises he has been conned. An arm waving loud argument starts that degenerates into a bout of major slapstick that wrecks the kitchen. When OMR finally sits on the rent man he pulls out a police whistle and blows. In those days rent men always carried police whistles, and the policeman was usually nearby. A Police Officer rushes in, OMR claims she has been attacked for her money, picking up the satchel, and the men have tarnished her virtue, feigning a dramatic swoon. The men are arrested and marched out. OMR pours another cup of tea, and sits down.

Kitty returns and sees the ruined kitchen.

K- Mother, mother, what have you done?
OMR – I’ve just tidied up dear.

OMR drains her cup takes money from the satchel and gives it to Kitty, telling her to go and get some groceries. Kitty leaves, OMR goes to the sink, gets out the rum, fills the cup, and then goes forward to toast the audience.

Curtain.

Imagine playing that sketch today, who would play which part? Personally, I think that if Hazel Blears could be persuaded to shave her head, she would be perfect for the rent man. Answers please to HM Treasury marked “Urgent For Chancellor”.

A Night At The Opera

A few weeks ago I thought I saw someone from the past, but it was impossible. Herman The German died fifty years ago. So it must have been a ghost. Herman was not German, but one of those unfortunates born before Kaiser Wilhelm II had a tiff with his family, who, as younger sons, attracted names from fashion or German culture. Think of Siegfried Farnon in “All Creatures Great And Small”. When Herman volunteered for The London Regiment in 1912 to get some paid for fresh air as a Territorial, he did not expect to go to France for four years in 1914, but the Army knew him as Henry, and his friends as Harry. Those who continued to call him Herman The German did not do so to his face. As a regular Covent Garden Market porter he expected and received the ordinary courtesies of life. He might have fought at Light Middleweight, but even the biggest Heavyweight needed to be careful, he could throw a mean hook, left or right, and you would not see it coming.

When I encountered Herman, I was wary of him, noticing the way he moved on the balls of his feet. He was wary of me, a student moonlighting for the rent money on a long night shift in The Garden. But when I met the challenge of moving a ton of spuds in a decent time, that was enough, so long as I did not intrude on his privacy and observed the ordinary courtesies. Although three times my age, he could still shift a ton or two a lot quicker than I could. Like many of his generation he shaved only once a week, bathed less often, had the language skills any modern comedian would pay a fortune for, and was as hard as nails. Apparently brought up by a Grandfather, he had been reared to believe that the British Empire was a bankers ramp, that socialists only wanted to live off other peoples money, that newspapers, and later the BBC and the film industry, were paid liars with posh accents. We young better educated men regarded his views as quaint and eccentric.

So it was not surprising that it was in the Floral Hall at Covent Garden where I saw the ghost rush past a few weeks ago. I was stone cold sober, waiting to go in to the auditorium and it was going to be a long stand amongst the huddle of the paupers at the back. The Hall is now part of the new Royal Opera House, housing a champagne bar and eating places costing a months old wages a bottle or a plate, and not a glass shed for flowers and vegetables. The tea costs near three pounds, a weeks rent over fifty years ago, when round the corner it used to cost tuppence a pint mug, or nothing if you had a full breakfast. I preferred it when Herman and his fellow porters were in and out with the barrows and bantering with the flower girls of all ages.

On Friday for the want of anything better to do I put on BBC4 to see if the “Acis and Galatea” from Covent Garden a few weeks ago worked on screen. There was the face of Herman staring from the screen. The same scruffy jacket, crumpled dirty open neck shirt, several days growth of grizzled beard, spiky unkempt hair, the hunted half crazed look in the eyes set in a reddened face, and the aggressive verbal thrust of a man who has been into the ring too often. But it was not Herman. It was Charles Hazlewood, the middle aged music man doing his manic youth presenter act.

The groan that escaped my lips was greater than when the monster Polyphemus did for Acis with a large rock. Ever since TV was visited on the masses the BBC has had presenters mostly in the style of Adjutants or Sergeant-Majors. There are the odd handwringing intellectuals but normally from sports to documentaries to politics we are hectored, loudly ordered to believe, told to be convinced by waving arms and thrusting fingers, and with the recent technology to make sure we notice are given thumping sound effects that leap up to fifteen decibels in volume without warning, I have checked with a meter. The flickering jump cutting may be great for a car chase film, but useless in a programme designed to convey information, or complex thinking, never mind disorienting for anyone with vision problems.

None of this does my temper nor my willingness to watch any good. So when we have classical music on the TV why does it so often have to be cheeky chappie Charles Hazlewood? He was the wrong man for the William Byrd documentary, and he is the wrong man for other things. I wish him well in his general career, he is a fine musician, but can he give the TV and all of us a rest?

If he really wants to look and behave like Herman The German, he needs to be able to shift a ton or more of vegetables from the church at one end of The Garden to the Floral Hall at the other without stopping and using only a two wheeled barrow.

Herman did not smoke, he chewed his baccy, being careful when expelling it, except if a dog was near to offer a target. I wonder, does Charles, surely not, but …………….

Money Playing Footsie

The other boot has just dropped. Whilst many of us have enjoyed the thrill of the chase in the last few days, someone just shot the fox. The problems of the last year were the first boot to drop, and those of us with an inclination to pessimism and the expectation of disaster have been waiting for the second. Standard and Poors have now obliged with their down grading of the UK sovereign debt.

As some have said this is based only on the visible debt that the government admits to. On top of this are lurking all sorts of other liabilities, all those unfunded pensions to meet as the baby boomers retire, and all those shifts and devices to keep debt off the books. The IMF do not like it, the markets when they have stopped trying to find excuses to massage the indexes upward will not like it, others do not like it. I like it even less than they do, because I am going to have pay for some of it.

In the USA the states of the Union are each chasing their budget deficits without too much success and the commercial property market is following the domestic market down. In Germany and Japan the exports are down and have further to go. Around the Mediterranean are a number of broken economies, which could damage the Euro. In one of them, Spain, are over a million UK citizens and pensioners, most badly hit in the pocket. What would happen even if only a quarter decided to pack up and come back to Blighty?

In the meantime the UK Government bodges, fudges and tries to move things by throwing money around. Quite where it is going is not certain. A good deal is borrowed back by the Government which will do no good at all. A lot is going off shore to reduce the losses of the London magnates who profited so much in the past. Inevitably, a good deal is following a lot of past government expenditure into the various rackets that have added to all the troubles, notably the housing benefit scheme, invaluable to the rented property sector owned by money launderers and those living on a purely cash basis for various reasons. Unless someone gets a grip it is all going to be very difficult. Just what is going to be cut and by how much? In the 1960’s Harold Wilson had to declare that the UK could no longer afford to be a power East of Suez. Someone may have to revive that policy very soon. In fact we may not be able to afford to be a power East of Great Yarmouth.

So the hounding of Sir Peter Viggers, MP for Gosport in Hampshire, who installed a Duck House in his lake paid for by the members allowances is almost quaint in comparison. What puzzles me is why he should have provided his ducks with their own detached property with taxpayers money, as no housing benefit was available. Perhaps he was genuinely trying to provide a market opportunity for all the growers of watercress in his constituency. But if the economy goes the way it might do, and the UK debt ratings go down for good, there may be only one option for him.

He will have to eat the ducks, of course after the watercress soup.