Dr Doom redux.

Lo and behold the very next day Italian debt goes above 7%. What I'd like to know is, when does Italy next have to go to the markets? To be clear, the 7% is the figure at which existing debt is changing hands, and whilst that doesn't affect Italy directly, it does give an indication of the price the country will have to stump up next time it wants to roll over some of its old stock. In Britain these things are handled by the Debt Management Office; whatever its Italian equivalent, I wouldn't mind having a look in their diary. That will be an interesting day.

Megan Greene, colleague of Dr Doom, Nouriel Roubini, was kind enough to email a response to yesterday's post. Basically we agree. She thinks that either the ECB will have to step in, or alternatively create fiscal union, double quick. But that's if the object is to save the Euro; she writes, "I don't think that should be the end goal". I don't think that can be the end goal.

In reply to Ms Greene I offered to give Dr Doom a few tips, just in case he feels his sooth-saying has lost its edge.

PS According to the Torygraph the next Italian bond auction is tomorrow. Oh dear.

Dr Doom and William Hill

Italy is in trouble. Just how much trouble may be inferred from the fact that the interest it must pay on bonds is nudging 7%, and this when it is running into a two-year period during which it must roll over about a quarter of its vast debts. 7% was the magic figure which tipped Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bail-out territory. But these were relatively small economies whereas Italy's is much much bigger, far to big to rescue with the Eurozone's pifflingly small 400 billion euro bail out fund. Attempts to leverage the fund with input from the BRICS countries have come to nothing; somewhere in a departure lounge or munching airline food, Christine Lagarde is roaming the world trying to find countries whose citizens don't have a state pension at all willing to pay into a fund to help those whose populations can retire at 55. Good luck with that, Christine.

Now here's Megan Greene, a colleague of Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, on the Today programme telling it like it is. "I think there are only two possible ends to this crisis. One is the ECB stepping in, providing massive amounts of credit easing. The other is fiscal union. It would be illegal for the ECB to become the lender of last resort. If it were to happen, someone would take it to court and win that case. Germany just wouldn't allow the ECB to start printing money."

Ms Greene undoubtedly knows a great deal more about economics than I do, but I think she is wrong about this. There are three possible ends, not two.

The ECB could step in, start printing money and use it to buy Italian bonds, but as she says that's unlikely for political and legal reasons; it's also true that fiscal union (of which an interventionist ECB would be a fundamental part) would be necessary to make monetary union work, and might actually do so. But fiscal union would be a seismic shift in the way the Eurozone operates; it would need negotiation, consensus and ratification by national parliaments. Even if these things were forthcoming, and even if the leadership so far glaringly absent from this debacle were miraculously to appear, they would take time to arrange. But the bond markets won't wait.

That's where my third possibility comes in. A third way it could end would be by the Euro collapsing. At this stage that seems to me to be most likely. William Hills are apparently offering 2/1, or thereabouts, that Greece will have left the Euro by the end of 2012. These would have struck me as generous odds even if the bet had specified the end of 2011. I can't see any way in which Greece will still be in the Euro by the end of 2012. This has got to be worth £50 of anyone's money.

Birtwhistle, Beethoven and John Adams

I found myself thinking about Harrison Birtwhistle last night. I'll explain why in a minute. I had gone to the Bridgewater to hear the Halle play John Adams' Harmonium, a piece I'd never heard before, although it's over thirty years old now. Harmonium is a long three-movement setting of John Donne and Emily Dickinson for choir and large orchestra, and opens the way it means to go on with the voices ululating gently and the instruments pulsing in and out. I liked it, although not as much as my wife and another (female) friend did. One of them enquired of Adams, "Is he still alive?", as if she intended to fly straight out to California and offer to have the composer's babies.

Even in the States, where there's more of a tradition of user friendly classical music, writing such a defiantly tonal piece in 1980 required some courage; in Britain it would have been an act of profound radicalism; at that time only John Tavener, with whom I was shortly to begin studying, was doing anything remotely similar. I wished I had heard it as a student: my own path back to tonality would have been so much easier to tread.

Someone involved with writing music inevitably finds responding to an unfamiliar work more problematic than a lay listener: you always bring a critical ear. Like many pieces written for a big orchestra, Harmonium does not (for me) let enough silence in; silence is like the white paper a watercolourist leaves blank to let the light shine through. Composers with a lot of instruments on the page are very reluctant to have them doing nothing. You generally couldn't hear the words; and although that might have been the Halle choir's fault, I think it was probably Adams'. The piece was perhaps a bit more boring than it needed to be. I went to sleep twice in it, woken each time by the music - which tended to linger on a pedal point for long periods - shifting to a new plane.

The other piece in the concert was the Eroica. I found it striking that Beethoven's harmonic language - an almost childishly simple conflation of triads and diminished sevenths - nevertheless enabled him to create a structure that was not only engaging, dramatic and touching (all things true of Adams's piece too) but also of granitic strength and cohesiveness. The ideas were worked through; when they were exhausted the piece finished and it felt right that it was doing so. The movements of Harmonium, by contrast, rather petered out. Like a badly performed Bruckner symphony, you didn't feel it ended because it had to; the movements could have been shorter or longer without the listener feeling particularly surprised. Whatever else he had done - and how the original audience must have been relieved to find a piece of contemporary music so ravishingly beautiful - Adams certainly hadn't found a way of making his tonal language an instrument of structure. Does it matter? Maybe not. My tastes lie in that direction though, and I think it can be done, even on the langourously slow-developing harmonic steppes of American minimalism.

But back to Harrison Birtwhistle. I thought of him because it struck me that our most celebrated composer is one whose music is broadly disliked by the public, to the exent that venues secretly give tickets away to make attendance figures look better, whereas the American way (without public subsidy) has produced a composer like Adams, who fills concert halls and whose music is broadly loved. What an indictment of the British way of art.

Iraq and the Arab Spring

Libya finally announces it is free from the dread hand of Colonel Gaddafi. Tunisia holds its first elections. President Obama announces the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It's a momentous morning.

I have been wondering what would happen in the commentariat when events of the Arab Spring began to be digested. Someone would look back at the Iraq invasion and try to fit it in to subsequent events. Assiduous readers of this blog will know that I supported the invasion (I believe that it was my support which finally persuaded Blair and Bush to go ahead; Dick Cheney had been particularly hesitant until he found out I was onside), not because I thought it was a good thing - it was self-evidently bad - but because I thought it might be marginally less bad than leaving Saddam Hussein in place.

Anyway, here's Jonathan Steele in this morning's Graun (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/23/us-withdrawal-iraq-defeat-bush-neocons?commentpage=last#end-of-comments) with his take on events. As you'll see, Steele complains that, far from Iraq's fledgling democracy inspiring other North African states, it might actually have put them off. "The instability and bloodshed which the US unleashed in Iraq were the example that Arabs sought to avoid, not emulate", he writes.

Yes, I too had noticed that Libya's awakening was achieved without any bloodshed whatsoever. And things are going well in Syria, where, in the absence of an armed insurrection, President Assad remains in power.

Steele's other complaint is that Iraq's transition to a democracy has given Iran more influence than it had when Saddam was in charge.

I wish he would step off the fence and be a bit less coy. Are we to infer that because Iran now has more influence, things were better during Saddam's era? And if so, better for whom?

We can abuse Blair, Bush, Cheney and Halliburton all we like, but surely the six million dollar question for Iraqis is, Did the invasion make things better for them in the medium and long term?

A clue to the answer lies in Steele's own article. He writes, ". . . when the Arab spring dawned, the Iraqi government found itself on the defensive as demonstrators took to the streets of Baghdad and Basra to protest against Maliki's authoritarianism and his government's US-supported clampdown on trade union activity".

Does anyone remember how street protests or trades unions fared under Saddam? My recollection is that there wasn't much of either. People were too terrified. Does anyone remember Saddam's government being "on the defensive" against its own people? My recollection is that there wasn't a government as such (the word implying something a bit more that a collection of stooges or family members dripping with medals). And for a government to be on the defensive, it must be capable of being attacked. But when Saddam was in power the "government" couldn't be "attacked" because there was no process by which to attack it. There were no elections, and to take part in a public demonstration was to invite one's own death.

To state these things explicitly in reverse, in Iraq there is a government, and an elected government at that. It is imperfect (so is ours), but the government can be "attacked" by public demonstrations or by the electoral process. Are these not gains worthy of some comment by Steele?

Apparently not. Steele has nothing to say about the way in which these things have only become possible because of the 2003 invasion; he only speaks of their current imperfections. If Bush and Blair had done what Steele and his fellow-travellers wanted, Saddam would still have been in power in Iraq. No doubt it possible to construct an argument that things were better then. I would like to see it attempted. But Steele does not even try. Funny that.

Get Gaddafi off the front page

Amidst all the hoo-ha about Colonel Gaddafi's death, the papers are missing today's big story. It is that M. Sarkozy and Frau Merkel are so far apart on a package to rescue the Euro that the announcement of decisions taken at the weekend's big German-French summit has had to be postponed to next Wednesday. Basically, the Germans don't want the EFSF to be leveraged in the way the French would like.

What the Germans are playing at I have no idea. Mrs Merkel must know that the EFSF, at 424 billion (I don't have a Euro sign on my QWERTY), is nowhere near big enough, and that some way must be found to increase it. Whether the ways proposed will work (making the EFSF guarantor of the first 20% of losses is unlikely to satisfy bond purchasers numerate enough to wonder what might happen to the remaining 80% of their money) is another matter.

As if to confirm the tenuous grasp on reality held by European leaders, the Grauniad this morning reports one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, as saying "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme . . . " The report goes on, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

Now no-one much likes the credit ratings agencies (although I don't remember people complaining about them when they were giving the go ahead for the West's enormous borrowing spree), but this is shooting the messenger. All the ratings agencies do is provide the financial markets with information. They are agents of transparency. What would M. Barnier prefer? That bond investors make decisions on rumour or innuendo instead? Does he really think that in a climate where the default position of investors is that a country might not be able to pay its bills, reducing the amount of information available will help to lower bond yields and make it easier for cash-strapped governments? I find it hard to believe, but apparently he does.

This is pretty symptomatic of the way the EU has handled this crisis. The facts are inconvenient? Ignore them. Actually no. Better still. Stop their publication.

Dale Farm and the rule of law

Ugly scenes this morning as the bailiffs and police break down barricades at Dale Farm. I have some sympathy with the occupants, particularly the children: whoever's fault this is, it's not theirs.

And yet the thing which keeps nagging me is the occupants' attitude to the law. They have used the courts to prevaricate and delay the inevitable for years. Each time the courts have ruled in their favour, the residents have expected Basildon Council to respect the judgment, and Basildon have complied, jumping through the legal hoops set for them at vast expense to Council Tax payers.

But when the courts have ruled for Basildon do the occupants comply? No. They barricade themselves in and threaten violence, making necessary this morning's militaristic-looking adventure. The residents can't have their cake and eat it. If Basildon Council had regarded the law in the same way as the residents, the bulldozers would have been into Dale Farm years ago.

The SNP, the NHS and the elderly

I've written before about the NHS's shameful treatment of the elderly (http://nicksimpsonmusic.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-serbia.html), and it came as a depressing no-surprise to find the Care Quality Commission reporting yesterday that of 100 hospitals it inspected recently, only 45% were providing proper service to elderly patients, and 20% were so bad that they were actually breaking the law.

I'm not going to waste time thinking of terms adequate to excoriate those responsible for this situation. Obviously individual callousness and inhumanity plays a part, but so also do overtraining (nurses with degrees, so the theory goes, are not overly keen to wipe up excrement), overwork and lack of money.

There is a connection between this story and another in the papers today. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has appalled campaigners concerned about British obesity levels by urging people to eat less and by trying to persuade manufacturers to cut calorie levels in food. Why is this so bad? Because, as Jamie Oliver says, manufacturers won't do it, and everyone already knows we should eat more healthily and exercise more.

About 60% of British adults and 30% of children are obese or overweight. Obese people get ill more and are more likely to end up in hospital. More pressure on hospitals means more work for nurses and more money spent treating people who, frankly, don't have to be there. All of which means worse treatment for other patients; including the elderly.

The Tories, sadly, seem reluctant to do anything which might offend their friends in big business. Lansley has fallen into the error of thinking that a laudable Tory idea ("people should take responsibility for their own actions") can be taken in isolation; whereas in this instance people failing to take responsibility means a drain on NHS resources, with consequences which are only too obvious.

Alcohol abuse probably costs the state even more than obesity, which is why the Scots have proposed a minimum price on drink.

When you find yourself yearning to be governed by the SNP, something somewhere has gone badly wrong.