A sane voice from the Right

Decisions! Decisions!

What to make of the whole Ireland debâcle? Malcolm reckons that Jason Walsh’s review for newswhip.ie is as good an overview as one might expect. The headline is also the conclusion:

Bailout reactions: consensus that bust is better

He starts with:

Famously, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that Ireland needed a new Jonathan Swift, saying only a satirist could communicate the true nature of what the bailout does: “punishing the populace for the bankers’ sins”.

Moreover Walsh gets us, in a retrogressive sexual time-warp, from Ms Whiplash to Mick Fealty, the Head-Lar of Slugger O’Toole in a single column:

“It’s like the Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Ireland has been forced to recognise how unimportant it is in the scheme of things,” says Fealty, noting the bailout was designed to protect the EU, not Ireland.

Fealty is also interested in how the question of sovereignty has cropped-up: “It’s not like virginity – it’s not something you lose once and then it’s gone. However, when the Germans come offering free money they may want to think very carefully.”

Dearie me! says shocked, naïf Malcolm.

Free-sheets are the order of the day, underfoot and in hand, on London Transport. Of the three, Allister Heath’s City A.M. is the only one that gets through three stops on the Circle Line.

Today’s main front-page piece is by Steve Dinneen:

Markets reject Ireland bailout

Dinneen won’t add greatly to the sum of  knowledge, especially after Walsh’s efficient précis. However, the same writer has another take under his by-line as “The Capitalist”:

IRELAND may have accepted an €85bn handout to keep it afloat, but why stop there? The ever-popular Powers That Be in Ireland seem to have come up with a novel solution to the country’s solvency issues.

An advert has appeared on Ireland’s biggest property website, the appropriately named daft.ie, offering the Republic of Ireland for a cut-price €900bn (o.n.o.).

The classified ad, posted by one Brian Cowen, says the property is available to move into immediately, with “full planning permission for 300,000 homes, eight prisons, five public hospitals, 10,000 schools… as well as hundreds of unfinished road developments”.

It warns the property is in need of some refurbishment but comes with stunning scenery.

There is at least one other gem in this edition of City A.M. It is a “Guest Comment” under the by-line of Mark Field.

“Who he?” you ask. Well, for the last decade, Tory MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, so with an ear to the ground at one end of town, and a voice at the other.

Field’s provocative piece seems not to be available on-line. At least for the natural audience of this free-sheet, it may be scandalously headlined:

Bondholders must take a haircut

After the throat-clearing, Field comes to his valid point:

The present panic in Ireland, so we are told, has been inflamed by the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s unilateral announcement that bond-holders should take a share of the responsibility for the costs of restructuring sovereign debt, not just European taxpayers. Yet to place blame on German shoulders is to shoot the messenger. Without a mechanism for sovereign-debt default, investors enjoy a perverse incentive to pump even more money into the riskiest economies. This will only be prevented if bondholders take an enforced haircut.

He goes on to argue that the September 2008 bank bailouts was essentially a political gambit to forestall further contagion. However, it has led bondholders to expect continuing and unbridled support from taxpayers:

This cannot go on. Further sovereign default in the Eurozone risks leaving European governments without either the financial capacity or political stock to let investors off the hook next time.

Field breaks ranks with the golf-club Tories who may have been chortling that the € is doomed:

It is hard to see how Greece or Ireland might ever be able to finance their debt in the global capital markets if expelled from the Eurozone. But it is not hard to envisage a fresh banking crisis.

While interest rates hover just above zero, banks have little incentive for banks to do their housekeeping and purge the huge unquantifiable toxic “assets” on their balance sheets. [That, at least, should no longer be true of Ireland].

Therein, then, lies the latent virus of the next calamity. If … when … that inflicts itself upon us, it would most likely precipitate a renewed credit crunch. “Most likely”? — oh, Mr Field, such sweet innocence!

With that further squeeze there evaporates any hope of the export-led, private-sector recovery on which all our hopes for economic growth are pinned. Those, like Malcolm, who wonder how every country can simultaneously manipulate its export-led recovery are less sanguine.

That apart, Field’s punchline is pertinent and chilling:

Conservative backbench critics of the Irish bailout are consoled by their clear understanding that British assistance would not have been offered to Portugal, Belgium of Spain.

Perhaps this faith will soon be put to the test.

November

John Fahy’s evocative image for the front-page of today’s Irish Times. The caption reads:

A rare sighting of a bottlenose dolphin breaching at Killiney Bay in front of a snow-covered Dalkey Island, Co Dublin.

A strange month. It shares with early February (when one senses the lightening of winter) a sense of ending: in some ways it is far more the “end of the year” than December. Come the solstice (this year 11:38 pm on 21st December), one can begin to anticipate the New Year. Annually, Malcolm’s old Dad would that evening solemnly puff his pipe, look out the window into the lowering darkness and pontificate: “The night’s are getting shorter”. But what to say about November, as it leaves us yet again?

Thomas Hood’s poem, a stand-by for every dusty school anthology,  catches this moment of low-spirits and worse moods:

No sun — no moon!
No morn — no noon!
No dawn — no dusk — no proper time of day —
No sky — no earthly view —
No distance looking blue —

No road — no street —
No “t’other side the way” —
No end to any Row —
No indications where the Crescents go —

No top to any steeple —
No recognitions of familiar people —
No courtesies for showing ‘em —
No knowing ‘em!

No mail — no post —
No news from any foreign coast —
No park–no ring–no afternoon gentility —
No company — no nobility —

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

That was November 1844. Eight years later Dickens, at his magnificent best, excelled at the same tone with In Chancery, the superb opening chapter of Bleak House, which symbolically locates the majesty of the Law in the worst squalor of metropolitan slime:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

That, of course, became the required atmosphere for any Hollywood-conceived London historical mystery or chiller. Today, now that Clean Air Acts and a switch to smokeless fuels have purged the worst of the London particulars, the effect is achieved by digital “enhancement” of stock scenes, generally shot around the Inns of Court (or, when that fails, Prague has to become London-on-the-Vlatava). The Pert Young Piece of Redfellow Hovel, whose legal education took her to such quarters, watches the cinematography while rattling off the street names, and how the cartographically-impossible sequences can exist only in the eye of the filmic beholder.

Dickens’s conceit of “mud” suggests the seasonal dry, crunchy leaves which quickly churn into sludgy muck. He is, in all truth, being euphemistic. His “mud” was the ankle-deep droppings of the thousands of horses that plodded London streets. This filth provided employment for the crossing-sweepers, the urchin-with-broom equivalent of the Venetian traghetto, providing uncrapped paths for the gentry, who in return were expected to subscribe their farthing.

Suddenly the trees are skeletal against grim, grey skies. Thanks to politicians we have that depressing Monday evening when the clocks have reverted to GMT, for the trudge home through a suddenly-dark evening. By the end of the month children go to and come back from school in twilit mirk.

London shares a latitude (approximately) with Irtutsk and Saskatoon. Only the North Atlantic drift and the jet stream prevent continental winter. This time last year Malcolm was sur le continent, enjoying (for want of a better word) that penetrating cold, with added scent of sewage, of le Plat Pays. Cue Brel:

Avec le vent du nord qui vient s’écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Perhaps so, if one is native to such things. Malcolm had to purchase ski-ing roll-necks to survive. East Anglia can manage something similar (generally, unless Farmer Giles is slurry-spraying up-wind, sans sewage) when the easterlies set in. Try Aldeburgh or Sizewell beaches in a black March frost, or Ely station anytime.

This year the jet stream got it amiss; and Britain has its early snowfall. Tuesday morning London awoke to its first splatter of the winter; and it is promised to worsen through the day. Since southern England has never fully grappled with the issue, we confidently expect road and rail to clog up imminently. Pubs across the Home Counties will resonate with tales of how the drive home on the A10 (or whatever) was akin to Scott’s last expedition.

Providentially, the winter fuel allowance has dropped through the letter-boxes and into bank accounts of the over-60s. As the ConDem coalition weasel-words its way around the various contradictory commitments (to preserve? to restrain? to abolish?) on this quite-modest expenditure, the facts are that last winter, a severe one, the excess seasonal deaths amounted to 23,100 souls — but still a statistical decrease on previous years. Take a bow, Gordon Brown.

Ever-unfashionable Walter de la Mare poignantly made the connection between this dark despond of the year and death in his account of November:

There is wind where the rose was,
Cold rain where sweet grass was,
And clouds like sheep
Stream o’er the steep
Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought warm where your hand was,
Nought gold where your hair was,
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.

Cold wind where your voice was,
Tears, tears where my heart was,
And ever with me,
Child, ever with me,
Silence where hope was.