Mrs Merkel blinks first?

The very day after I lambasted Angela Merkel for her failure of leadership in the Eurozone, the Torygraph reports here that Mutti is showing signs of relenting on her opposition to Eurobonds.  Now the writer of the Torygraph article, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, is a well known Eurosceptic, and should be taken with a pinch of salt.  But if he is right, and Mrs Merkel is willing to drop her opposition to a European Redemption Pact, that is quite big news.

How would the ERP work?  Not surprisingly details of a fund that doesn't yet exist are sketchy, but the idea seems to be that countries' debts above and beyond the 60% of GDP permitted by the Maastricht treaty (remember that?) would be gradually transferred into that fund, paid for by bonds issued jointly by Eurozone countries, and supported by collateral from within the existing reserves of individual states.  Effectively it would allow struggling countries to borrow at bond rates more like those of the Germans.

Obviously I do not know whether this will work in the long term.  The interesting thing is that two of Germany's opposition parties say they support the idea, and Frau Merkel depends on their support to get the recent Stability and Growth Pact ratified.  Ultimately these things only work if the financial markets believe in the structure, and any such scheme will be examined in cold-eyed forensic detail by people who are really interested in money.  So it may not fly.

The overarching problem of the Euro however, namely the crippling currency imbalance between northern and southern Europe, is not remotely addressed by the ERP.  It will do nothing to make Spain, for instance, more competitive or German exports more expensive.  At very best it looks like the mother of all can-kicking exercises, guaranteed to stave off the immediate borrowing problems faced by Italy and Spain, but doing absolutely nothing to solve the design faults which led to those borrowing problems in the first place.  As Evans Pritchard himself wrote when this idea was first mooted at the end of May, "the South would still face the long grind of internal devaluation - or wage deflation - breaking societies on the wheel".

As the financial crisis limps on, those at the top, their careers founded on devotion to The Project, have displayed a striking tenacity and inventiveness in keeping it going.  As long as the Euro is limping on, breaking societies on the wheel will seem to them a small price to pay.  Because, secure in their well remunerated jobs, it is not being paid by them.

the long silence from cheadle

No, it doesn't quite have the same resonance as The Long Silence from Jarvenpaa.  And if putting a foreign name at the end instead of a bland Manchester suburb doesn't illuminate anything for you, I should perhaps explain that Jarvenpaa in Finland was where Sibelius lived for the latter half of his life, and The Long Silence the period from the mid-1920s to the composer's death during which he wrote pretty much nothing at all.

No one really knows why Sibelius stopped writing.  He worked on an 8th Symphony, but, pestered by the conductor Koussevitsky who wanted the premiere for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, delayed and delayed completion and is thought eventually to have burned the score.  Perhaps he felt that his music was diametrically opposed to the spirit of the modernist times.  Perhaps he had written himself out.  It has happened to plenty of others, Elgar for instance.

At a slightly more mundane level, this year is the first for more than 30 during which I have written, thus far, pretty much nothing at all myself.  I am in the middle of a set of four orchestral pieces, tentatively entitled Absence of Clouds.  My own more modest silence has come about because I am becoming very slightly more successful (if you start from a low enough base, there is nowhere to go but up).  I have mostly been involved in revising some of my own pieces for performances and producing parts for them.  It's a time consuming business.  There have also been concerts to conduct, and builders to organise for the family dacha.  It is a busy life of privilege, and no doubt when the Occupy protestors get fed up of picketing banks and start to look for people who are enjoying themselves too much, I will be put up against a wall.  With any luck sufficient time will have passed for me to look old and pitiable.

Yesterday however I finally began writing the last movement of Absence, and I'll be carrying on when I've finished wasting time writing this blog.

There is one other silence to rectify.  I haven't written anything directly about the Eurozone for months.

How to find the words to convey the sense of the economic bike chain being swung in the china shop, the ratcheting up of the financial stakes, the strain on political systems, the damage to living standards across the world, the incompetence of the leadership?  The Euro was clearly not set up to bring our continent's economy to its knees, but if you had set out to create a device for doing so you would be pretty pleased with what the Euro has done.

Europe needs debt mutualisation and/or QE on a massive scale, now.  With every month that passes in which this doesn't happen things in Europe will get worse and worse.  First the Greeks can't pay their way.  Then Spanish and Italian bond yields go through the roof.  Mario Draghi's LTRO at the ECB takes up the strain for a few weeks, but now it becomes apparent that Spain's banking system is sitting on huge losses.  The proposed bail out adds about a third to Spain's national debt, suborns Spanish bondholders (making it more expensive for Spain to borrow), and, bizarrely, forces countries like Italy, itself in trouble, to borrow at, say, 5% to lend to Spain at 3%.  To call it an Alice in Wonderland world absolutely misses the dark and dangerous potentialities.

It doesn't help that the Eurozone has been hamstrung by bad leadership.  Only yesterday Manuel Barroso was proposing to fix the Spanish banking problems by way of a banking union where there was Europe-wide regulation.  Even a fool could see that this would never be a runner, because cross-Europe bank guarantees would enable southern banks to fund their governments, thus making northern European taxpayers responsible for southern debts, and Barroso was duly slapped down by Wolfgang Schauble.  Could Barroso not have worked this out before opening his mouth?  Apparently not.

I am reminded of Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.  This is even worse.  Now Nero is a committee (invent your own acronym), and it is not just Rome burning, but Madrid, Dublin and Athens too.

But of all the bad leadership on display, Angela Merkel must take the biscuit.  Yes of course, the Greeks have been profligate and corrupt, and it is very difficult for Frau Merkel to sell the prospect of pouring German taxpayers' money into the Hellenic black hole.  But where Merkel is truly guilty is in failing to explain to the German people (failing, so far as I know, even to acknowledge publicly) that while the Euro has made Greek exports expensive by shackling it to other stronger economies, principally Germany, the reverse also applies: Germany has benefited hugely by being tied to weak southern European economies which have lowered the value of the Euro and made German exports cheaper.  In other words, Germany's prosperity has been achieved partly by being in the Euro with the basket cases of the south.  Germany is trying to have its cake and eat it - it wants to have the benefit of a single currency without taking the responsibilities that must go with it if it is to work.

The Euro was meant to make everyone prosperous, but as I wrote a few weeks ago it has only served to make some countries very prosperous and others very poor.  And it will carry on doing that as long as the Eurozone exists in its current form.  The Eurozone needs either fiscal union, Germany's departure or total disbandment.

As for the prospects of getting any economic growth here in the UK, you can forget it until the Euro mess is sorted out.

Jonathan Franzen and Sure Start

Every now and again the Great American Novel #94 swims massively into view, the most recent incarnation being Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  I did not think Freedom was a particularly good novel, written beautifully from page to page, but with characters in thrall to a clunking plot scheme, denied the liberty to develop naturally, reduced in some cases to mere cardboard cutouts jumping through sigh-inducing narrative events, all to illustrate Franzen's larger ideas.  Ambitious but flawed.

I thought about Freedom the other day however, listening to some people talking on the radio about the Coalition's changes to, of all things, support for young families.  Money for Sure Start centres is apparently being cut, and the government is putting money instead into an online service.  One woman said something very striking: "There's no doubt that British people are falling out of love with parenting".

Now I was a young parent several years before the advent of Sure Start, and my knowledge of it is confined to the anecdotal view that it is patronised on the whole by middle-class people who don't need it anyway.  Certainly the only people I know who use it would fit that description, and this seemed to be accepted by the panel.  The argument seemed to be about whether there were any means which could be used to reach the kind of people who really did need care and attention.

My answer to that would be "probably not".  I wouldn't say that British people are falling out of love with parenting.  I would say that we, or some of us anyway, are increasingly unwilling to accept the responsibilities that being parents imposes on you.  Because whereas life before parenthood means you can do pretty much what you like within the constraints of spare time, economic circumstance and the law, afterwards you are stuffed.  Afterwards you put your children first, and that means giving up a very large part of your autonomy.

If people are less willing to accept this, why would that be?  In the West we have in the last century or so been increasingly seduced by the idea of freedom, and in particular the idea freedom of personal morality.  We should, we believe, be able to do pretty much what we like.  In a society where freedom is prized so highly, it's perhaps not surprising that people are quite reluctant to stick with something so inherently unglamorous and inhibiting as parenthood.

Giving people freedom gives them the option of making bad choices as well as good.  In the context of family life, it means giving them parents the freedom to do the job really badly, if at all.  It means greeting their transgressions with a shrug of the shoulders and a cheque for millions to fund care and support.

I used to be puzzled by the distinction between liberalism and libertarianism.  One was evidently good and the other, being espoused by the Right, was self-evidently bad.  But why should this be, when both were evidently devoted to freedom?  It is now becoming a bit clearer.  Liberalism gives people freedom, but then devotes a lot of time and money to helping them when they make bad choices.  Libertarianism gives people freedom, but tells them they are on their own if they get it wrong.

Of the two, Liberalism is more superficially appealing, but probably encourages bad choices to the same extent as Libertarianism discourages them.  And if Libertarianism is unforgiving, it is nevertheless a whole lot cheaper for a country whose money has run out.  Expect to see more of it, soon.

David Cameron gets something right shock

Amidst all the hoo-ha about the Eurozone (the most dramatic and gripping news story for years; by turns horrifying, fascinating, infuriating and funny), the press seems to have forgotten what a twist its knickers got into at the end of last year, when, in mid-December, David Cameron announced he wasn't going to sign the EU bail-out treaty.  How the media squealed - the Tory right that at last we were sticking it to the Eurocrats, and the liberal Left that we were isolating ourselves unnecessarily.

Six months on, how do these reactions look?  Compromised on both sides.  To the chagrin of the Torygraph we are still handing money over to help prop up a single currency which they said, correctly, would not work.

But it's the Left which got it thoroughly wrong.  Will Hutton, writing at the time in Guardian, described Cameron's refusal as an act of "crass stupidity".  Jonathan Freedland, a couple of days earlier, wrote that as a result "Europe is advancing towards its integrated destiny, with Britain in its rear-view mirror.  The two-speed Europe has arrived, with Britain in a slow lane of one."  Again in the Guardian, John Harris seemed to be on a broader highway: "So, look where we find ourselves: crawling along in the slow lane of a newly three-speed Europe, with no clear idea of where we might be going."


This on the other hand is what I wrote about the treaty (on 11 December 2011):

"It contains fiscal rules which will not be obeyed, attempts to impose austerity measures which will make even less likely that countries will be able to grow their way out of trouble (and which there are now some signs that electorates of individual countries won't accept), makes no provision for transfers between rich and poor regions of the EU and does nothing to make the ECB a lender of last resort."


And look what has happened to the treaty now.  France saw that the perpetual austerity it imposed was poisonous, kicked out its president and elected another on a pledge to renegotiate.  The Dutch government collapsed for similar reasons.  Spain has mass unemployment and a run on the banks because of its attempts to toe the Eurozone line.  Greece is within a whisker of exit from the currency because its people cannot decide whether they are willing to accept the strictures of austerity.

Actually the treaty has revealed Eurozone leaders to be naive and economically illiterate - it does nothing to address the currency imbalances at the heart of the crisis, and tries to impose on member states indefinite recession which their people will not tolerate.

There are two ways out of the mess, debt mutualisation by way of Eurobonds, or massive QE.  Since the latter will be marginally more acceptable to the German electorate, that's probably the course Mrs Merkel will eventually agree.  Although it will probably happen only after minds have been concentrated by Greece's departure.

Cameron was right not to sign, and I have seen not one word from his critics acknowledging that his refusal has been vindicated.

Ah, I hear you say, but Cameron didn't refuse because he thought the economics of the treaty wouldn't work.  He refused because he didn't want a Europe-wide transaction tax.  Perhaps.  But that isn't my point.  Cameron was criticised because refusing to sign would, his critics claimed, isolate us.  But this has not happened to Britain, or if it has I haven't noticed; and it doesn't seem to have deterred France, Holland or Spain from trying to get the treaty changed.  The inexorable logic of the liberal press is that we should sign any treaty the EU wants, simply on the basis that if we don't no-one will listen to us any more.

And there's something else.  The history of the Euro, from its inception to its precarious present (for all the world like a giant volcano waiting to go off), is one of pious hopes, naive economics, hard choices deferred and naked national self-interest.  The disadvantage of isolation from such a gathering is what exactly?

I am not viscerally anti EU.  I am all for free trade and being nice to one another.  But there is a limit to all things, and economic union is not possible without a forcible watering down of national identities, cultural, economic, political and linguistic, which, personally, I rather like.  In particular the Euro, which was supposed to make its participants prosperous, has only served to make some of them very prosperous and some stony broke.

John Harris concluded his Guardian article by quoting Orwell thus: "The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time".

Of course Orwell is right about very nearly everything; but he didn't live to see the Euro, and with his characteristic intellectual fearlessness I am sure he would have concluded that in this case it is foreigners who didn't take us seriously; and look what a price they are paying for their mistake.

Unprecedented posturing

"We deplore this weak and unjust decision", said Burglar Bill and Burglar Betty today after being charged with theft of three packets of razor blades from Boots. In a statement released to the press the Burglars described the decision of the CPS to press charges as "unprecedented posturing".

 Well not quite.  The statement was actually released by Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie, after they were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.  But that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

The Brooks' don't get it.  They are in the hands of the law now.  The days when issuing a press statement might make their troubles go away are long gone.

If the Brooks' wanted to have a go at stopping the case they could conceivably Judicially Review the decision.  But all the CPS have to demonstrate is that there is a realistic prospect of a successful prosecution.  In other words they just have to show a prima facie case.  The best lawyers the prosecution have got will have gone over this with a fine tooth comb, and you can bet your bottom dollar the prima facie case can be made out.  In the absence of clear political motives for the prosecution, the Brooks' will just have to sit this one out and hope the jury is on their side.

The Brooks' may well be innocent, but I have a feeling that in Rebekah's case particularly the notion that no-one is above the law will come as a surprise for her as unwelcome as it is well-deserved.

Man City buy happiness

I followed yesterday's title decider from the safety of the allotment, checking the scores intermittently on my mobile whilst putting up a fruit frame.  It was only at 10 to 5, when my daughter texted me to say that United were winning and City were 2-1 down, that I ran over to the car to hear the last rites on the radio.  I had so inured myself to the assurances from their fans and the media that the title was going to Eastlands, that the amazing news that in the next five minutes or so United were going to win the Premiership again sent the adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Extra time was just beginning.  Dzeko scored.  There were three minutes left.  Could 10-man QPR hold out?  Then Aguero scored.  Mayhem.  From the council estate next door came shouts and screams of delight.  I walked rather more slowly back to the gooseberry bushes.  My wife and Jane stood regarding me, trying to read the body language.  "He's smiling", Jane said.  "I feel sorry for City", said my wife.

But of course City had won.  I was smiling because I went to watch City twice when I was a boy in about 1969, and for a couple of years after that I would have said I was a City fan.  But after that I was away at school in Yorkshire, and began with friends to go and watch Barnsley at weekends.  They were in the old Fourth Division then, so no-one can call me a glory hunter.   I don't live near Barnsley any more, and over the years kind friends have taken me to see United again and again.  So when City play United I find I want the Reds to win.  When United play Barnsley (it happened once or twice in about 1998) I support the Tykes.  I'm not a very consistent football fan.

So I was smiling because I have a soft spot for City, but also because I was musing on the wonderful unpredictability of sport.  In art, the author or composer knows the outcome.  And, if we're honest, so does the audience most of the time.  The baddies don't often come out on top.  At the end of Lear (Spoiler Alert!), Cordelia cops it.  Mind you, so do Goneril and Regan.  But in sport, anything can happen; and yesterday in Manchester, it pretty much just did.

Incidentally, we now know the answer to the age old question - in case you were still wondering, money can buy happiness.  City's expensively assembled team have proved it.

Stephen Lawrence and the Rochdale nine.

Periodically it has been necessary for this blog to point out that, whatever their faults, the Metropolitain police are probably not institutionally racist. The force merely employs quite a lot of racist individuals, working in an environment where a disproportionate number of the criminals are black.

A couple of years ago I quoted here Dr. Richard Stone, one of the Macpherson inquiry's members, as follows (this was from the Guardian): "We couldn't believe the police investigated murders in general as they had done with the Stephen Lawrence case .... insufficient evidence was presented to us to draw the conclusion that it might have been corruption so we were left with one other possibility, that it had to be racism".

It didn't seem to have occurred to Macpherson that the Met might have messed up the Lawrence case because they were incompetent, a possibility which, from my experience of dealing with the Met as a lawyer in the 1990s, would have been the overwhelmingly obvious avenue to explore.

In April 2012 the press reported that the Home Secretary was considering instituting a new inquiry after it emerged that a senior police officer associated with the Lawrence case had links to a criminal associate of David Norris's father, Norris being one of the two convicted last January of the murder.

It now seems Macpherson might have been wrong about corruption as well.

Clearly Macpherson's decision will have had an impact on policing in this country, and there is a widely held view that this has been for the good. An institution, which in my experience was reasonably liberal at least at senior level, subsequently tried strenuously to be more liberal still. Inevitably, in the decade after Macpherson, individuals who could endorse this agenda wholeheartedly rose within the ranks to decision-making positions at the top.

It is interesting to consider the relationship between this issue and the successful prosecution yesterday of nine Asian men for offences against underage girls in Rochdale. "It is my firm belief", writes Julie Bindel in this mornings Graun, "based on interviews with a number of victims, family members, campaigners and professionals such as police and social workers, that where the gangs are of Asian origin there has been a tendency in some areas of England to ignore the issue for fear of being branded racist".

Now here's Allison Pearson, writing in this morning's Torygraph: "Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, who at least had the guts to bring the case to court after social workers and the police turned away for fear of being seen as racist, admitted that “imported cultural baggage” played a role in the crimes. That’s the same baggage that brought quaint customs like forced marriages, honour killing and female genital mutilation to these isles."

Pearson quotes Afzal thus: “(The convicted men) think that women are some lesser beings. The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn men to them… These girls were on the streets at midnight. It made them easy prey for evil men.”

"So the case turns out to be a tale of two cultures", writes Pearson. "On the one hand, we have white girls, raised in a godless, under-parented, over-sexualised society, who have little respect for themselves or their bodies and – even worse – no adults taking responsibility. On the other, we have a different kind of “respect”, the warped creed of a sub-section of unreconstructed, brutally over-parenting men. Their own daughters and young female relatives must not be violated or they will lose their market value, so why not take out your sexual frustration on the despised native slappers instead?"

Pearson finishes, "Stymied by political correctness, social workers, carers, police, lawyers and council staff all failed to protect those young Rochdale girls. They were victims twice over. First, of the despicable men who traded and abused them, and second, of our well-meaning, foolish and deadly desire to avoid the issue of race at any cost."

To return to Stephen Lawrence for a moment, it's not difficult to see how the Macpherson report's findings should have contributed to a climate, at least as far as the police are concerned, where hypersensitivity about race should lead to decisions being made like the one alleged in Rochdale.  What if a white gang had systematically abused Asian girls - could any of us conceive the police deciding not to prosecute in such circumstances?  Not many, I think.  Thus does overzealous political correctness rot a society from within.  Just like racism, in fact.

Despite her promising start, Pearson ends up confusing race with culture. Mind you, so does Julie Bindel and just about everyone else. For example, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, accused Pakistani community elders (in the Telegraph again) of “burying their heads in the sand”, insisting that race is “central to the actions of the criminals. They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought...”

But while the colour of the girls' skin might have helped dehumanise them for their exploiters, it was their willingness to enter into the alcohol-decked margins of the web spun by the paedophiles, and the lack of parental supervision and concern which helped make the abuse possible. The men would not have abused the girls if they had belonged to their own community, but it is equally true that Asian girls would not have behaved as these girls did.

These things are cultural rather than racial phenomena.  To make only the most obvious point, his race doesn't seem to have made Nazir Afzal, the man who led the prosecution, a bad man, any more than race made David Norris, one of Stephen Lawrence's murderers, a good one.  To that extent skin colour is irrelevant: it is no more than a (wildly inaccurate) marker for culture.

Culture is what makes some societies succeed and others fail.  It is the background to everything we do, the context in which individuals make decisions about how to act.  Whereas race is skin deep, culture goes right to our core.

In Rochdale, as in so many other Northern towns, there are two communities and, as Pearson says, two cultures living side by side.  This case has arisen out of a ghastly mating of the two.