Boom Bang A Bang

It's all the rage ...

A bodyguard was being quizzed by detectives after explosives were found in his house.
An army bomb squad searched Justin Cartwright's family home after police found suspicious items that could be used to make explosive devices.

According to friends, the accused intended to supply incendiary devices to bodyguard firms to use in training scenarios. Once again our rulers stifle the honest endeavour of the British working man. No wonder so many members of the British explosives community find it easier to relocate to Waziristan.

As for the British exploding community ...

A 30-year-old man has appeared before magistrates, charged with making explosives at home. The court heard police found 12 grams of the homemade explosive hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD) in Donatien Chamchawala's kitchen cupboard in Blackwood, Caerphilly. Mark Topping, prosecuting, told the court at Newport it was enough to cause "substantial damage" had it exploded.

Mr Chamchawala was remanded in custody to appear in court again on 20 April.

Some HMTD crystals were also found at the two-bedroom semi-detached house, as was an attempt to make a form of plastic explosive, the hearing was told. Mr Chamchawala was arrested and the house raided by Gwent Police on 4 April, after neighbours heard loud bangs and saw smoke, Mr Topping said.

Donatien Chamchawala ? Where's that name from ? Donatien was the first name of the Marquis de Sade, while the Chamchawala family feature in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

While we're blowing things up, I hadn't realised that the 7/7 bombers apparently used the same H2O2/chapatti flour mix as the 21/7 asylum seekers. I'd never heard of the NEFA Foundation, an American band of anti-jihadis, but their report on the 21/7 flop is fascinating stuff. In my chemistry days I used to think 100 vol hydrogen peroxide was pretty pokey stuff, an opinion based on what happens when you drop a grain of pot permang into some. Fume cupboard and eye protection are advised, rather than this foolish chap's kitchen surface.

The 7/7 bombers were apparently buying 60 vol (i.e. 1 ml of peroxide liberates 60 ml of oxygen gas) or 18% solution, and boiling it down to 70% - which if my maths is right equates to around 230 volume. Quite a lot of oxygen. You wouldn't have thought chapatti flour made a terribly good fuel, but apparently it does.

Not a bad site, NEFA. This portrait of Bradford wannabe jihadi Aabid Khan, given 12 years in 2008, is far more detailed than anything Uk-sourced.



Lordy. Eight o'clock Mass tomorrow and then off to see the in-laws. Back Monday.

"The finance industry has effectively captured our government"

Via Liam Halligan, this Atlantic essay by Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, crystallises a lot of my thoughts and fears about where we are and where we are going. Although written about the US, pretty much everything in it applies in spades to the UK.

More than a few bloggers have noted that in many societies, power has been in the hands of a priestly class, who write in a priestly language, using a terminology and a set of commonly understood assumptions which laymen cannot follow. Hence the class cannot be challenged or debated with - simply not having the tools with which to argue. To some extent this is a characteristic of all "in-groups" - whether social workers, doctors, teachers or gang members, the acronyms (or street slang) and common references are both a means of binding the group together and of excluding outsiders.

Those rightish bloggers who see Gordon and co as the return of Old Labour, Red in tooth and claw and itching to nationalise everything that moves, altogether underestimate the gravity of the situation. This government - and its predecessor - do not want to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy. They want to tax them. Remember that 1997 was the assumption of full state power by the ideals and idealists of the Sixties (and remember that the Sixties actually went mainstream among students in the Seventies, when our current rulers were at Uni). These people don't want to do anything as grubby as, say, running a steel industry, water supplies or even a bank. These aren't Attlee and Bevin, let alone municipal socialists like Joe Chamberlain. In the final analysis, while their actions are likely to be extremely serious for their country, they themselves are not serious people.

They've been doling out taxpayer cash to their preferred causes since Student Union days. They're convinced that talking to people - via teachers, lecturers, doctors and nurses, social workers, anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators, fake charity employees, tax-funded "community activists", the BBC, the government's huge advertising budget - can change their behaviour, if those people are criminals, benefit spongers or the other ne'er-do-wells created by a Welfare state designed for a 1948 generation but delivered to a 2008 generation. *

But these initiatives cost money. The only way to get it, at least until they recently discovered the printing press, was via taxation. You need fat profits and earnings - and the City of London provided the fattest. Didn't something like a quarter of UK tax receipts come from the City until recently ?

They couldn't run a bank to save their lives, although I'm sure there are some more competent civil servants than John Gieve. All they can hope to do is to shovel tax money at the bankers and hope somehow to get the whole doomed show back on the road. The Lloyds/HBOS saga shows how desperately they do NOT want to nationalise. Indeed, they're still selling off stuff that even the Tories might have balked at - like the manufacture of our nuclear warheads.

I digress. Perhaps. The point is that NuLab have no desire to penetrate the mysteries of banking - and the arch-priests have convinced them that they, and only they, can return the golden days of yore.

And this is the theme of Johnson's essay - that control of economic policy has been pretty much handed over to the people who landed us here. He starts with a portrait of a typical supplicant nation at the IMF door :

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

Hmm. That last sentence ring any bells ? OK, what happens when the risky bets don't come off ?

With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

It all seems terribly familiar to me.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

It does to him, too.

... these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside. The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on ... From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007. The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan.

By strange chance the blossoming of the financial sector on both sides of the Atlantic since the Thatcher and Reagan eras parallels the decline of manufacturing in both countries (admittedly far worse here) and the boom in imports. I'm sure I read somewhere that half of all UK science graduates with firsts go into the City. And how did the priesthood rise ?

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance. As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar’s Poker, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. … They’d read my book as a how-to manual.”

I think the late Ralph Miliband would call this 'hegemony'.

... the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world ...(which of course was actually a declining position - LT)

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

Don't forget de facto if not de jure free movement of people, too. Then it all hit the buffers. And what is the Government doing ?

... the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.

This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, “We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, ‘We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.’” And the plan lets them do just that: “By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks.” Kashkari didn’t mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change.

Yup. The addicted gambler is treated by filling his pockets with chips and shoving him back through the casino door. The names of the banks are different, but the deals are similar.

...we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

Yay. Good bank ! Willem Buiter, thou should'st be living at this hour !

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

I have quoted an awful lot, but you really should read the whole thing. Note that a few oligarchs only get chopped when the riots start - otherwise Joe Public gets the financial hit. The Brits - especially those who'll be paying the bankers bills - aren't a riotous bunch. My guess is that the undoubted rage will be expressed through the ballot box.

UPDATE - Willem Buiter says the same thing :

Governments everywhere are doing the best they can to delay or prevent the lifting of the veil of uncertainty and disinformation that most banks have cast over their battered balance sheets. The banking establishment and the financial establishment representing the beneficial owners of the institutions exposed to the banks as unsecured creditors - pension funds, insurance companies, other banks, foreign investors including sovereign wealth funds - have captured the key governments, their central banks, their regulators, supervisors and accounting standard setters to a degree never seen before.

* (although, to be fair, they do believe that the behaviour of racists, foxhunters and parents who smack their children can be changed by imprisonment and sackings)

George Osborne "Good Policy" Shock Horror

If he's serious, this is excellent news :

A Conservative government would look at whether Britain needs smaller banks, shadow chancellor George Osborne has said in a speech. Mr Osborne said the eventual sell-off of part-nationalised banks should not necessarily be to the highest bidder but those benefiting the economy most. Creating larger institutions could encourage more risk because they were "too big to fail", he added. It would be a "bitter irony" if the sector became "even riskier", he said.

He's quite right. Both here and in the US regulators should be breaking up financial institutions into small enough units that the failure of one has a minimal domino effect. But doubtless the reason nothing will be done (and I'd be so pleased to be proved wrong) is that the banks will 'need to be large enough to compete internationally' or similar. In which case we'll be back where we were, only more so, as we now have the Lloyds / HBOS behemoth. As I said :

"if the banks were 'too big to fail', shouldn't we be thinking, both here and in the States, of breaking them up into units which could be allowed to fail - with appropriate protections for depositors ? Instead we're creating even bigger banks."

I would love to be persuaded that the Tories have the root of the matter in them, as Churchill would put it. But I fear that my General Election vote will be a case of the least worst option.

M. Pot - may I introduce you to Mme Kettle ?

Guido on Tom Watson and fellow denizens of the Browning Street Bunker :

They are intent on a dirty, smear filled, personalised, negative, divisive political campaign that will reach a new low in British politics ... They have no coherent positive strategy, they only have political poison to offer ...

Hang on. I yield to no man in my despision of Gordon and all his vile work. But isn't Guido the chap who coined the phrase 'the Prime Mentalist' and illustrated 'Is Brown Bonkers' with the Glorious Leader photoshopped as a clown ?

While there's plenty of good political red meat in his blog, I thought personalised negativism was Guido's USP. As a commenter said on the 'Brown Bonkers' thread :

"It is low politics to hurl abuse at opponents...."

FFS that the whole purpose of this blog. Without the bile and insults we may as well switch over to Ma Dales.

I must say if Watson, Derek Draper and co try and cut up rough (there are already a claque of presumably full-time Labour people carpet-bombing blogs like Guido's with anti-Tory comments) political invective looks like it could be going back to the days of Gillray and his scandalous cartoons.

Been Away ...

More than a quarter of a century ago a young Laban, on his way to a party given by a college friend, stepped off a bus on a filthy November night in a small Northern seaport he'd never visited. That night he met his future wife - and he fell in love with the town, too. The town with this gravestone :




And this magnificent cake shop :



And this pier :



We met up with the girl who gave the party all those years back (now lives in California) and a few of the other nurses they used to work with. Just as much chat, if somewhat less alcohol, my daughter and California daughter got on like a house on fire, and sons walked the mean streets (and they are mean after dark) and arcades.

There are some signs that the place is trying to go upmarket - the old Marine cafe of chips-with-everything teas is now a shiny brasserie-type bar, and several other places have been revamped in a similar Swedish kitchen showroom style. I deplore these tendencies. Fewer fishing boats every visit, too.




These herring, waiting to be smoked, come from Norway.




But it's still a wonderful and beautiful place.

Blogging will recommence when I've unpacked ....

Traditional East-End Villains (more torture in the community)

This lot - Adnan Kyani, Mohammed Nawaz, Douglas Poku, Benjamin Boakye, Andrew Boateng and Yaw Darko-Kwakye - got 34 years for kidnap and torture. Between six of them. Let me see, that's 34 halved is seventeen, divided by six - about 2 years 9 months each after you knock off the 18 days.

Yaw Darko-Kwakye ?

If you shouted his name at him in the street you'd be jailed for racist abuse.

Well, I'm Shocked

A former police officer has been jailed for two-and-a-half years after admitting four counts of sexual activity with a 15-year-old boy.

Mark Brigham was serving with the Metropolitan Police when the incident took place in Portsmouth, in 2008.

The victim's family asked Brigham, a lesbian and gay liaison officer, for advice after their son came out as homosexual, the court heard.

You simply can't trust anyone these days, can you ?

Yes, It's Honour-Based Homophobia !

Allegedly. I'll let you be the judge.

A gay man accused of murdering his former lover by dousing him in petrol and setting him on fire has said his Muslim friend tried to frame him after finding out he was homosexual.

Nadim Kurrimbukus, 25, also known as Adam, denies setting fire to 23-year-old Charlie Davies outside his home in Templedene Avenue, Staines, at 11.20pm on June 14 last year. His co-accused Yusuf Dulloo, 27, said in a police interview he drove with Kurrimbukus to Mr Davies’ home on the same night and heard a scream after his friend had left the car, but he denied any knowledge of the attack.

But the following day they met at Hounslow train station where Kurrimbukus confessed to him that he “lit the guy”, Dulloo told detectives. Kurrimbukus, a former West Thames College and Isleworth and Syon School pupil, told Kingston Crown Court this week that his Muslim friend was lying to punish him after discovering he was gay.

Dressed smartly in a suit and tie and wearing glasses, he said: “In Islam you are not allowed to be gay. There’s such a thing as an honour killing. Dulloo’s lying as a punishment. He is trying to punish me after he found out about my sexuality.”

Hmm. I suppose it's worth a try.


(the late Charlie Davis)

More Torture In The Community

I suppose, unlike many other victims, they did at least survive.

Hounslow Council has won its appeal against a High Court ruling which awarded almost £100,000 in damages to a vulnerable couple who suffered physical and sexual abuse in their own flat by a gang of youths.

A top judge today ruled that despite the suffering the couple endured at the hands of four youths, Hounslow Council could not be blamed for what had happened.

At the initial High hearing last May, Judge Maddison said a lack of communication between council departments had led to the couple, who both have learning difficulties, being subjected to a weekend-long assault in late 2000.

The couple - referred to only as X and Y in court - were made to perform sex acts on each other, drink their own urine and eat the faeces of one of the gang members, who threatened to stab them if they did not comply.

The traumatic assaults were carried out at the couple’s council-owned flat, often witnessed by Y’s children, who are now in their teens.

A number of the assailants had been living in the flat for months before the attack after the couple tried to befriend them.

During last year’s hearing Judge Maddison said the council had acted "negligently" in its handling of the situation.

He said the council should have transferred the family to other housing and a social worker had written to the director of housing before the assault asking whether a "catastrophe" had to occur before it happened.

The couple were awarded £97,000 damages by the court.

However, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, today said the couple had made the mistake of being kind to the youths and overturned the ruling leaving the couple without a penny.

Hounslow Council today said it was pleased the judge had praised social worker Tajinder Hayre, who was responsible for the couple, ruling she was blameless in the incident.

A spokeswoman added: “This is an extremely sad case, and we have every sympathy for the claimants, who were subjected to an appalling ordeal.

"We are also pleased to note that the Court of Appeal praised the social worker involved for her 'impeccable behaviour'."

This "in the community" stuff is a godsend for councils. If the couple had been living in some local equivalent of Barnsley Hall, they would be unlikely to have had (presumably heavily state-subsidised) children, but if they'd been abused in the care of the local authority someone would be responsible for them. As it is, the highest courts in the land are telling them they're on their own :

A social worker had told police the vulnerable pair were being exploited, but was informed that no action could be taken unless the couple complained themselves.
The council employee had also called for the couple to be rehoused. Lawyers for the couple argued the social worker should have realised they were in danger and had them moved.

Hounslow Council took their case to the Appeal Court which ruled the council had no duty of care to the couple. Sir Anthony Clarke, who headed the appeal judges, said: "There is an important difference between a case where children assert that a duty of care is owed to them and a case like this where the claimants are adults living in the community, albeit vulnerable adults."

And what of their torturers ? The trial didn't seem to make the headlines - maybe there wasn't one. (Apparently three presumably anonymous 'youths' were sent down - more distressing details in this story)

As I said last time someone was tortured then murdered, a few months back :

I'm sure there were dark sides to the old "homes" and "loony-bins", where those who were once called 'simples' or 'naturals' often ended up (in the absence of devoted, fit and time-rich relatives). But there's little evidence of their inmates being tortured to death.

Doubtless the heartbreaking details will unfold in due course. If the past is any guide to the future, his torturers and killers will turn out to be well-known locally, "known to social services" and the law, and with habits including petty crime, assault and drug abuse. It's quite possible that at least one of them will be female.

Hmm ...

Photo : Harpymarx


What's the officer on the left thinking as he furtively eyeballs her bare midriff ?

And They Say The Law Has No Sense Of Humour ...

BBC.

A man and a woman have been jailed over the death of an innocent shopper in a queue-jumping row in south London. Southwark Crown Court heard Antonette Richardson called Tony Virasami to a Sainsbury's store in Merton where he hit Kevin Tripp, a bystander who had nothing to do with the dispute. Father-of-one Mr Tripp, 57, from Colliers Wood, south-west London, died when the "almighty blow" caused him to fall and fracture his skull, causing bleeding on the brain.

Richardson was jailed for 18 months and ex-boyfriend Virasami received four years for manslaughter.

So far so bog-standard. They've been on remand since last June, so she'll walk free (halve the sentence and knock off I think another 18 days - one of Labour's prison-emptying ideas) and he'll do another year or so. Less than two years for killing a stranger in an utterly unprovoked attack.

It's this bit that gets me :

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said the sentences reflected the "shock and concern felt by the public at large".

Quite the comedian, isn't he ?

Deflation ?

Petrol's going up by 2p, having crept up from around 86p to 93p or so already this year, water rates by over 4%, council tax by 3% (and that's presented as a triumph of frugality). Food prices are rising, as is the price of everything we import.

It's a pity the protesters in London today will be the usual suspects - hideously white, hideously middle-class, hideously 'left', if you can call it that, hideously tax-funded.

I'm sure there are lots of Brits who will be going to work today but are just as cross with our glorious leaders, but with more reason.

"On a lighter note" ... how a bright and savvy programmer facilitated the sub-prime disaster by creating better software to facilitate the slicing and dicing of mortgages into bonds (there are other factors, of course).

Just A Passing Thought

Back in 2004, at the last EU elections, a lot of people were cheesed off with both the government AND the main opposition parties. The BNP got 4.8% of the vote and UKIP got 16% - helped no end by a wealthy donor (was he a carpet millionaire ? I forget) who paid for an awful lot of billboards. I remember seeing them in Swindon as I negotiated the Magic Roundabout. My impression was that they made UKIP somehow look more electable. Big billboards = big party.

My gut feel is that a lot more people are cheesed off in 2009 - maybe 25% of the voters. But it must be said that despite their dozen seats and Mr Farage's magnificent demolition of El Gordo last week, UKIP haven't exactly set the Rhine on fire. As far as I knew, they didn't have a sugar daddy either, as they did in 2004. Where would the cheesed-off vote go this time ? Would it stay with UKIP, move to the BNP, or find some new party coming up on the rails ? Is Libertas the dark horse ? Didn't look likely - it looked as if the BNP might be the ones to benefit.

Enter a sugar-daddy.

The Conservative party says it is expelling one of its multi-millionaire donors after he gave £100,000 to UKIP. Spread-betting tycoon Stuart Wheeler said he had made the UKIP donation because he believed the Tories were too soft on European integration.

Mr Wheeler, an outspoken Eurosceptic, gave £5m to the Conservatives in 2001 and wanted to remain a party member. The Tories said he would be given 28 days to appeal against expulsion but Mr Wheeler said he had no plans to do so.

It's not long to the elections. I'm not a big conspiracy theorist - at least, not unless Mr Wheeler suddenly finds another half-million or more for election billboards, before rejoining the Tories in 2010 - but you do have to say it's most helpful for UKIP - and uncharacteristic, not to mention bad-mannered, of the Tories to expel a chap who's given them five million quid. Just saying.

New Polls - Brown's Ratings Improve

Harry Hutton on top form.

"The imprisonment and rape of his daughter may be taking a toll on Fritzl's approval ratings, particularly among women voters, the survey found. The Prime Minister scored higher than Fritzl on law and order and family values, though voters trusted Fritzl more to manage the economy.

Brown, who repeatedly raped the British economy during a horrific 12-year ordeal ..."

Laban Goes To College

It's the time of year when Britain's world-renowned universities open their doors to prospective students, and so Saturday found Laban heading for the "University of the East of Wales" (formerly Blackwood Miners Welfare), giving my son a lift to the Open Day. I had nothing else to do, so I thought I'd stroll the sacred groves and see how things had changed in the last thirty-five years.

The first change is that I wasn't the only parent on site - at least a third, maybe more than half of the prospective students were accompanied - in many cases by both Mum and Dad. That just didn't happen back in the day - you'd no more have wanted your parents on campus with you than your dentist. The generation war seems to have ended - at least as far as the middle classes are concerned. For that's the other thing that struck me as I sat in the cafeteria - how very middle-class the overwhelming majority of the prospective students seemed - far more so at this former Poly than at my Victorian red-brick alma mater. It does tend to reinforce the theory that the massive expansion of further education (and lowering of standards) has benefited the middle rather than the working classes - although of course it could be that middle-class youth just talk louder.

That's not to say that there's no radical counterculture anymore - although there isn't. The radical counterculture is now mainstream. The student newspaper points out that 'experimenting with drugs is, for many, an important and natural part of university life'. The 'Reclaim The Night' marches against male violence are now mixed-sex - it would have been a brave Yorkshireman in 1977 who attempted to join the women on the streets of Leeds.

(Although I did note that the legendary 'one in four women a victim of domestic violence' statistic is now apparently old-hat. According to Julie Bindel it's now one in two :

"In Britain, it is estimated that one in two women will experience domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking during their lifetime"

Whereas pretty much 100% of men really will experience physical assault - but let it pass.)

Where was I ? Ah yes. The 'one in four' stat now applies to rape, if the good students of the local Reclaim The Night march (three pages in the student paper) are correct :





My son went off to a little chat by his prospective lecturers, and left the cafeteria to darkness and to me. Why not fill a few unforgiving minutes by going along to one of these introductory chats ? After all, half the parents were accompanying their offspring to the lectures, and I could always claim to be a prospective student. I looked at the timetable of talks. Aha ! This should be good.




The head of Criminology at the University of the East of Wales turned out to be a shortish but hefty chap with a goatee, shaved head and a ring in each ear, dressed in a dark suit and black shirt - the deviant gangster effect being topped off with a pink tie. Obviously a man whose soul was in his work. The clicheometer was off the scale even before he opened his mouth - but he flattered to deceive, disappointingly sticking to listing the numbers of staff, students, and where the lectures were.

His sidekicks were a slightly camp chap in his thirties who specialised in 'Psycho-Social studies' and said 'it's about ..' a lot, and a strapping and self-assured redhead with a hard-to-place accent (Mancunian Irish ?) - between them they thankfully returned the clicheometer to full boost vertical - where it stayed for the rest of the lecture.

Psycho-Social started off, explaining to the prospective undergrads that the "common-sense solutions" to crime which might appear intuitively appealing needed to be replaced by a "sociological perspective". We had to, he said, go beyond common-sense solutions if we wanted to end poverty and racism. Nobody in his audience asked what that had to do with crime - we were sure we'd find out later (and we did). He listed the compulsory modules for the first year - 'Social Inequality' and 'Contemporary Critiques of Modern Society'. I'm pretty sure Peters Hitchens and Oborne won't feature in the latter. The general thrust was that views on crime and criminals in society at large were fairly simple - perhaps even naively so. But things were more complicated than that - a lot more. Why else would criminology be a subject you could study at university ? The good news was that you would become conversant with these complexities.

Ms Fit, resplendent in the sunshine flooding across the room (and slightly distracting Laban with the translucency - nay, almost transparency of her dress), took the floor. She spoke of 'offenders', of 'those involved in criminal acts' - and at this point I realised that the word 'criminal' had not once been spoken by these three criminologists. She reiterated that criminology 'also needs to challenge taken for granted or common sense views of crime, particularly those represented in the media'. The words ''Daily Mail" hung in the air. I breathed a silent prayer of "go on, say it !", but alas she resisted the temptation womanfully, moving on to 'the social forces and social divisions which influence which acts count as crimes'. Have you ever wondered, she asked, why white collar crime is not investigated by the Criminal Justice System ?

And so it went on. And on. I'll pass over 'factors such as unemployment, poverty ... coupled with interrelated divisions along the lines of gender and sexuality, 'race' (in quotes - because it doesn't exist) , age and economic inequalities'. I think you get the picture. I gathered that :

Year One is spent knocking those stupid 'common-sense' ideas out of you, and replacing them with 'the sociological perpective', in a slo-mo version of the first few days of an Exegesis course, or your first few months in the Army, where you drop the baggage you've brought with you, and embrace the culture of the group.

Year Two is spent discovering that prison is at once a tool of social control and an expensive way of making bad people worse - or it would be if they were bad people. On analysing the stats (you see, that's what criminologists do - look at real data), and discovering that 'incarcerated offenders' are statistically more likely to be poor and/or black, it is but a short step to the conclusion that they have been convicted because they are poor and/or black.

Year Three is spent analysing the Daily Mail, whose writers and readers have not done years 1 and 2, and bemoaning its influence.

I looked round the room at the eager young faces, all athirst for knowledge. Poor sods, I thought. Let's hope the social life makes up.

Psycho-Social took the floor again. What kind of job will a criminology degree get you ? Where do our graduates go ?

#1 - further study

#2 - social work, probation service, "community work" and other jobs in the criminal justice system

#3 - teaching

#4 - personnel (loads of 'social science' grads end up there. That's why you get asked your ethnic origin when you apply for a job)

A great wave of cognitive dissonance came over me. Both lecturers had said explicitly that they and their department were challenging 'society's' view of crime. Yet they were providing the social workers and probation officers of today and tomorrow. I got no inkling from their chat that the state-funded EEW criminology department was out on some left-wing limb - indeed rather the opposite - that theirs were the views of mainstream UK criminology (and have been IMHO for some thirty years).

Yet they were apparently the rebels, the iconoclasts - despite controlling the universities and great chunks of the criminal justice system . In their shoes, wouldn't you be tempted to wonder why, after years in which your views have completely dominated the education system, those views have so stubbornly refused to take root among the general population ?

Who and what was this 'society' and what power does it actually have ?

I came to the conclusions

a) people who've not done Criminology and/or read the Daily Mail

b) not a great deal

More Music ...

Someone has put up the studio mix of John Martyn's Hurt In Your Heart.


(and I see that the Who's Baba O'Riley is still filling dancefloors nearly 40 years on. There are mixes here. And here. And elsewhere. Some bearable, some dire. Imitation ... flattery.)

Friday Night Is Music Night

The first two via my son. This one sounds amazingly like 'Press To Play'-era McCartney. But it's good for all that. Bon Iver. Love that guitar.




This guy was a management consultant. But it's good for all that. John Legend. The guy can sing.



A long while back I blogged inter alia on Pedro Gutierrez, aka Pete Terrace, King of the Boogaloo.

I'll see if I can get 'Do the Boogaloo' onto Youtube in the near future, but in the meantime - It's Boogaloo Time !



UPDATE - Done it. More boogaloo.







On a more depressing note ... I always wondered how ageing beauty, wonderful singer and hopeless smackhead Nico, on whom I have blogged here and here, got on in her declining, Manchester days hanging out with the likes of John Cooper Clarke. Nico - in the chip shop queue ?

Alas, it was all pretty damn sordid. From her last keyboard player and collaborator James Young's book, some excerpts. Not child or work-friendly - don't read while having your tea.

A Wee Post ...

At Biased BBC.

Inflating Our Way Out Of Debt

It has become apparent to commentators like Liam Halligan that the Great Deflation Scare of 2009 is, in his words :

"... largely a myth – an alibi for wildly expansionary fiscal and monetary policy concocted by Western governments and their media lackeys.

After all, where is deflation? Data released last week put annual US core inflation at no less than 4pc. So why is the Fed doing this, following the Bank of England's lead? Because the real solution – forcing banks to face the music, while rescheduling massive private and public debts – is too politically frightening for our so-called leaders to contemplate.

A decision has been made, but not announced: we'll inflate away our debts instead"

Media lackeys ? That's a bit strong. Anyone in mind, Liam ? Robert Peston's been waving the spectre of deflation for some time - as has the entire BBC news output.

I invite readers to study the evolution of Tuesday's lead BBC news story, from "Deflation risk as prices to fall" all the way through to "Surprise hike in consumer prices". Bloggers like CityUnslicker and Alice Cook were far more on the ball than the mainstream media.

It turns out that the only component of inflation to fall is mortgage costs - completely under the control of HMG/BoE. Everything else is going up. The only deflation is caused by the Government - and then they've used the spectre, aided by their "media lackeys", to start up the printing presses. Peston's December comment that "The US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England regard the great threat right now as deflation" remarkably ignores the parallel appreciation of the dollar and depreciation of the pound. In David Bowie's immortal words "This is not America".

To be fair, the inflation's caused by HMG too. The weakness of the UK economy, the government's massive and increasing deficit as tax receipts collapse, the fact that they spent in the good times and have nowt left for the bad, not to mention the announcement that the presses would roll - these have devalued the pound by some 28% since last summer. It's this that is driving inflation, given that we import a lot more than we export.

We're actually 1.2% above the BoEs official (albeit fiddled) inflation target of CPI at 2% - so they should be raising interest rates. I wonder why we're not ? And RPI stood at 0% in 1960 - did we start up the presses then ?

Bloggers like Matt T suggest I'm in danger of succumbing to conspiracy theories. I always try to use Occcam's Razor when presented with such a thing. For example, the UK cultural collapse can be explained quite neatly without bringing in any Zionist plotters or master-plan of Antonio Gramsci's.

But printing cash makes logical sense (from Labour's perspective). They won't/can't stop spending - I'm sure Polly Toynbee would argue that the State is needed more than ever in these hard times. Just like Mugabe's soldiers, the key client groups need paying. Tax receipts will continue to fall. The pound will really take a hit, and HMG won't be able to borrow, if they run an even greater deficit, as even Mervyn King has warned. Where else will they get the money from ? I really can't see anywhere.

I was expecting the FT to fall to maybe 2500 this year - but since then it's risen from about 3400 to nearly 4000 as Brown and Obama print away. Whether this is a bear rally and prices will resume the downward trend is yet to be seen - but there can be little doubt that all this newly-created dosh will in the long term cause asset prices to rise again, and my pension to be devalued, as the bubbles are reflated. It's all a question of timing. When will inflation kick in ?

(a shorter version of this was posted yesterday at Biased BBC)

What's Been Going On, Then ?

The economic crisis, and the government's responses to it, is still the biggest story around. And it won't go away for years - perhaps decades, at the rate HMG are clocking up the tab marked 'future taxpayer liabilities'. I'm still reading stuff like UK Bubble, the Capitalists and the FT's excellent Alphaville blog (I'm sad to see that having bailed out the Scottish banks, a Scottish building society, the Dunfermline, may be next in the queue) pretty much daily.


HMG's plan is to deflate away the value of outstanding debt, devaluing fixed incomes (like pensions) in a transfer of wealth from savers to debtors (and to governments - after all, they own the presses). They're aware that too much borrowing and not enough saving created the mess in the beginning, but in the interests of keeping the show on the road they've reluctantly decided that these habits must be reinforced rather than curbed. The collapse of asset prices is such that the bubble must be reinflated.

When the markets saw what Labour were doing, they devalued the pound. What's really scary is that the Swiss - of all people - have been selling off Swiss francs to drive down the value of their currency - while the US have followed Gordon to the printing presses.

The Swiss example wasn't too bad, although surprising - a competetive devaluation. If all countries do that, the net result is pretty much zero. But if all countries start up the presses, the inflationary implications are that it's time to get out of cash and find some asset - any asset - which will hold value. Shares, gold and oil all rose on the news of the US printing.

Obama seems not to have a grip on the crisis - admittedly, neither has anyone else. The bail-out is turning into the biggest pork-barrel in US history.

President Obama still enjoys the popularity that comes with not being George Bush, especially in a city top-heavy with Democrats. But his initial response to the global calamity that he found on entering the Oval Office has not inspired popularity’s more sober elder brother, confidence. Large constituencies, notably business, are voicing their scepticism openly. The President’s much-vaunted $787 billion stimulus package is being widely interpreted, even by some of those (such as Warren Buffett, America’s second-richest man) who openly supported Mr Obama for the presidency, as a serious failure. And we are only just past the first 50 days.

Mr Obama is lucky that his Republican opponents in Congress are disorganised, incoherent and without ideas of their own.

The big question from a purely selfish point of view is - will there be a window of opportunity between now and inflation kicking in ? When prices are still falling and cash still has some value ?

I've been reading Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers over the last week or two :

"he provides a straightforward and persuasively argued thesis: Great Power ascendency (over the long-term or in specific conflicts) correlates strongly to available resources and economic durability; military "over-stretch" and a concomitant relative decline is the consistent threat facing powers whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for"

It's not exactly rocket science. Countries with a military clout greater than their industrial base warrants will in time lose that military clout. Countries with a hefty economic base will find it easier to develop military clout. And (as applies to individuals as well), if it can be done, it often will be done. It's a long time since Cheng Ho's fleet sailed the Indian Ocean - I just have a feeling I may see his successor admiral in my lifetime. I was thinking that as I assembled my son's new Argos corner desk for his homework last week - bolt-together veneered chipboard from China.

"whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for" - Afghanistan, anyone, as our soldiers continue to be blown up in under-armoured vehicles ? Iraq ? What's scary is that the US is also becoming such a nation - and, like us, they've chosen to keep the existing, declining system going - it's the rational short term thing to do.

As I'm continually pointing out, when an economy declines, financial hegemony will move on. Florence and Antwerp are no longer the capitals of world banking.

One other nice little quote from the book, which is apparently taken from C. McEvedy's Penguin Atlas of Recent History. Particularly relevant in the light of Boris Johnson's illegal immigrant amnesty plans (he also wants to keep taxes low for high earners). He's talking about the late Austro-Hungarian Empire :

(For most European Great Powers) a majority of the citizenry shared a common language and religion. At least 90 per cent of Frenchmen spoke French and the same proportion belonged at least nominally to the Catholic Church. More than eight in every ten Prussians were German (the rest were mostly Poles) and of the Germans 70 per cent were Protestant. The Tsar's seventy million subjects included some notable minorities (five million Poles, three and a half million Finns, Ests, Letts and Latvians, and three million assorted Caucasians), but that still left fifty millions who were both Russian and Orthodox. And the inhabitants of the British Isles were 90 per cent English-speaking and 70 per cent Protestant. Countries like this needed little holding together; they had an intrinsic cohesion. By contrast the Austrian Emperor ruled an ethnic mishmash that must have made him groan every time he thought about it. He and eight million of his subjects were German, but twice as many were Slays of one sort or another (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs), five million were Hungarians, five million Italians and two million Romanians. What sort of nation did that make?

The answer is none at all.

Have a nice day.