I've Never Seen A Site That Didn't Look Better Looking Back.

At midnight tonight, it appears that Basildon Council will officially serve notice of eviction to the inhabitants of Dale Farm in Essex. The result of this is that the people who live there, who call themselves Travellers, will be turfed off the land which they own because of repeated planning violations over the course of a decade or so. Predictably, the usual suspects are up in arms, including the Luvvie-In-Chief and all-round UN Good Egg Vannessa Redgrave who whinged out of my radio this morning telling me the "just go down there" and meet these people. The local Catholic bish went and did his bit, although he was altogether more sensible in his ideas, merely suggesting that the Council had better have a good idea of where people were going to go.

Still, it's quite a difference between the calls for the law to be rigorously enforced with regards to the rioters of two weeks ago, and pleas for mercy and the bending of the law for the gypsies. It is the personal opinion of your humble correspondant that the law applies to everybody, regardless of which particular law, and regardless of whatever special specious racial circumstances surround the issue. Planning law applies to everybody wishing to alter their land to ensure that the whole UK doesn't turn into one giant, unmitigated hellhole like Dale Farm.

Various defences have been put forward to persuade Basildon Council to allow the gypises to remain where they are, primarily to do with race. Indeed, the blog dedicated to Dale Farm specifically accuses Basildon council of racism for turning down their planning applications without considering the other reasons for doing so. I think quite a good one is that the whole area looks like an inhabited cess-pit - precisely the sort of thing the planning rules are there to avoid.

In any case "Traveller" is not a race, so racism cannot possibly be involved. The inhabitants claim to be descended from Scottish, Irish and Romanian wanderers, which seems essentially to encompass Europe, making them Europeans. Is it possible to be racist against your own race? Furthermore, in decribing themselves as Travellers, I'm sure I'm not wrong in inferring that means they intend to travel, perhaps when their position on a certain bit of land becomes untenable?

Whether Travellers can be considered a distinct race or not, the issue is not about that. It is evident that in a functioning society, everybody must follow the same laws. A property the immediately abuts Dale Farm must after all keep the law of the land, apparently simply because the inhabitant has the great misfortune not to be a gypsy, if those same gipsies are to be believed. No, I am firmly on the side of Basildon Council here. A decade is far to long for a planning dispute to go on, and they should have been told to clear out years ago if they continued to ignore the law.

What Came Ye Into Mayfair to Seek? A Man Dressed In Soft Raiment?

I work for a high value fund in Mayfair in London, a traditional haunt of the rich and well dressed. Since the invasion of super-rich Russians and Saudis over the last decade, this has become less evident, but I believe there is still a ring of truth to the idea. If there is one thing that will undermine the genteel society of the Clubs on the other side of Piccadilly though, it is the abhorence of dress down Friday.

From where I am sitting, in an office of five, I can see two pairs of jeans. The only tie I have seen all day has been the one I am wearing. "Why so offended?" you might ask, and it is a fair question. After all, why dress smartly if one doesn't need to? The fund is succesful and makes a lot of people very rich, so ties can be done without, can't they?

The problem with that argument is that it reduces people to homo economicus. Happily, money is not the only thing in life, although we increasingly seem to forget that, and through the pernicious influence of dress down Fridays, society is in danger of losing its élan and grace. Up until quite recently, one was careful to show everyone what a sober and succesful chap one was through the astute deployment of a well-cut suit and discretely patterned tie, and this was merely the most visible symptom of a culture that lived by a well-defined set of behavioural rules. Snobby though it sounds, deference was a part of this, and I believe that it was a very good thing. Having definite rules to follow in the majority of social encounters ensures that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing at any one time. Somewhat like a military parade, a known set of actions leads to order and harmony. This is why table manners are considered so important. It's not the actual rules themselves that matter - they're pretty arbitrary and vary from culture to culture - rather, it's the fact that there are rules to follow. Everyone knows what they are supposed to do and everyone fits in.

In the modern age, social rules are considered deeply unfashionable. Dress codes are a good example, particularly for evening wear. There is a reason men wear black tie and appear so monochrome: it is to allow the ladies, who wear splendid dresses and dazzling jewellery, to take the limelight, while the gentlemen remain elegant yet unobtrusive. Now though, some men seem to have forgotten this very simple rule and insist on trying to out-dress each other ever more casually, like a crowd of spoiled children. Who can show the most chest hair? Ooooh, pick me!

I recommend that everybody remember that no man is an island. Shoes are polished and shirts are ironed for the same reasons that foul language is avoided and hands are shaken with a smile: everybody likes to feel valued and that other people they encounter have made an effort, even in a nebulous and impersonal way, to impress them. Since lazy celebrities have made it "cool", or at least socially acceptable to appear in public in scandalous states of undress, we have lost our manners in matters of clothing, resulting in the endless confusion as to what on Earth that ludicrous instruction "smart-casual" actually means.The sooner we can get back to a nationwide adherence to a small thing like an unwritten dress-code, the sooner we can hope to strive for a perfect example of a lady or gentleman.

Look Beyond Our Narrow Confines

This morning, news came through that UK net migration is up 21% on last year, which seems to have rather weakened the coalition's claims to trying to stem immigration. It is mildly surprising that so few Britons have upped sticks and left to work in more congenial environments - perhaps to places not threatened with imminent financial collapse - but rather less surprising is the provenance of many of our new chums. Being part of the EU, Britain is bound by laws from our excellent friends in Brussels to take all comers from within the European Economic Area, regardless of whether they're actually any good or not. The number of non-student immigrants who come without a job to go into stands at a six year high, just at the time when the political classes are rushing about wringing their hands over the vast number of unproductive wastrels making a nest of the benefits system.

While these statistics may be annoying, I do not think that they will be particularly significant to anybody who does not base their lives on what the Daily Mail tells them. What is useful about them is that they raise two questions which are very significant at the moment. Firstly, by far the largest single group of immigrants is that made up of students coming to take advantage of our excellent but creaking higher education system. Indeed, overseas students, through their higher fees, now contribute a significant portion of the income of many universities, particularly those with the great financial misfortune to be humanities-heavy, and their numbers increase every year. Meanwhile, British students are finding it increasingly difficult to get into university, such is the pressure on space, as well as having to pay a lot more. Since the market is quite clearly strong for foreign students wishing to come to study in the UK, why not put the squeeze on foreign students rather than our own?

The second point that the migration figures raise is that of the EU. Every time new immigration figures arrive, there are always calls to reduce it in some way, and that generally means capping extra-EU immigration. This, unfortunately, does not actually help as immigration from Europe continues to be allowed. All very splendid - many hands make light work and all that - but why must it only be EU immigrants?

I have a good friend and bridge partner who came to the UK from Australia having got a good degree from a very good university despite all the while serving in the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve. She now works for a well known law firm in the City and is a credit to her profession, but will shortly have to return to Australia for an extended period while renewing her visa. Not only does this remove a motivated and productive member of the work force who would otherwise continue to contribute tax revenue, it means that a subject of the Queen, a person who shares our Head of State, Parliamentary system, judicial system, military tradition, language and a good deal of our history and culture is ejected from the country in favour of immigrants who share none of these things and are not required to be at all qualified.

Now that the euro appears close to collapse, and even traditionally stable countries such as France are feeling the pinch and credit agencies beginning to look crititcally at AAA rated EU countries, is there much point in us staying in the EU? The English Channel has been described as the biggest cultural fault line in the world, and it is true that most Britons feel they have very little in common with their fellow Europeans. On the other hand, the Commonwealth provides a ready-made bloc of fifty-four countries, with the majority of which we have far more in common and has the excellent strength of having a much more diverse economic basis, and a much wider global reach. No single currency obviates the possibility of an bloc-wide default, and the diplomatic potential is arguably much greater.

Let's get shot of these CAP-munching, debt-reliant, orgy-indulging contintentals and remember why we never used to care about Europe anyway. The world is a big place, and there is a lot more out there than a Franco-German hegemony can offer us. At least I might be able to keep my bridge partner...

The Nonsense of Spreading Democracy

In the news this morning, looking bad in the papers and upsetting civilians at their breakfast, came reports from the vast meat grinder of the Middle East (all new recipe, now with added Libya!) Gaddafi is apparently about to get his head kicked in by the heroic Rebel Alliance supported by the occasional friendly missile lobbed over from Italy, while east of Suez, the Assad's minions are taking the fight to the Syrian rebels in no uncertain terms. Over all this, the "civilised" EU and United States occasionally condescend to wheeze ineffectually at the overlords of these places. Still, important to show solidarity with the oppressed masses, eh?

Of course it's not.

I didn't see hordes of newly liberated Iraqis charging over to give the rioters a damn good bit of what for a couple of weeks ago, and neither do I expect to see grateful Libyans weeping at the godlike munificence of NATO for sending some aeroplanes and ships to obliterate a war machine fighting with sixty year-old weapons. Just like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, the captivating saga of the Middle-East peace process, and now Libya, I am reasonably certain that Western sabre-rattling will be followed up with a bomb or several in Syria to support the people we suddenly care about there, and the outcome will be the same: a lot of soldiers with sand in their underwear, a few dead, and an admission of ultimate failure, all for the bargain price of more than a trillion dollars.

So why do we care at all? Well, there's a goodish lake of oil under the deserts at the unfashionable end of the Mediterranean, but that's not it, or there'd be a Saudi-Arabia-shaped whole in the world by now. I suspect it's more to do with the fact that developed Western nations all really would quite like some nice big empires again, but are stymied by a lefitsh concern who delude themselves that many parts of the world are acutally better off without us. The only thing left to do then is to go and show off our big shiny penises guns and tanks by pretending to liberate a country from an oppressor who in many cases was put in charge by the west in the first place.

If only we got something out of the whole sorry business, I'm not sure I'd mind so much. Charging off on a proper imperialist war, in which we might at least break even, would make some sort of sense. The clowns whose heads we continually feel the need to bang together might even learn something about how to run a country. I like to think that just before Britain quit many of her colonies, there may have been discussions not unadjacent to a famous Monty Python sketch, and the beneficial proceeds of empire are clear for those with eyes to see. Now though the only things we build after decades of war are democratic systems for people who can't make them work, which in a country ruined by war, theocracy and desert is hardly surprising. At any rate, the denizens of the Cradle of Civilisation are well used to dictatorships by now, and have well-developed conflict-orientated ways of sorting out disputes. Why waste money on trying to make them do it our way, when it's more than likely they'll get it wrong and have to be violently shown the way again in two decades' time? It'll end in tears either way, so we might as well keep our chaps out of it if we're only losing money.

Imposing a political system cannot be done in a half-arsed manner. It has been shown over and over again that as soon as the tanks leave, it all goes downhill. The obvious solution is either not to put the tanks there in the first place and let people massacre each other, or not to remove them once the shooting has stopped. Put in political systems and make sure they stay there by running them ourselves. Teach the illiterate, free the women, feed the hungry and heal the sick, or do none of those things and stay at home. Let's stop being so squeamish about the issue - it's all or nothing, and it's got to be worth everybody's while.

The World's Bottomless Money Pit

When I was at school, I recall watching recordings of news footage and documentaries on all sorts of global disasters. A particular favourite topic of my teacher was the recurrence of famine in East Africa, and every time we did a case study, someone would raise their hand and say, "But sir, it seems they have a famine there almost every other day. Why do people stay there?" I always thought this was a good question, but it provoked gales of fury from the decidedly lefty master and was never really answered to my satisfaction. However, I think now is a good time to be asking such a question, along with a couple of other pertinent ones.

Since 1950, East Africa, most particularly Ethiopia, but Somalia and Eritrea were also frequently affected, has suffered nine really big famines, in 1958, 1972-1973, 1984-1985, 1991-1992, 1998-2000, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2011. Most of these were caused by drought and then exacerbated by local warlords taking advantage of the situation to have yet another bust up, but other aspects such as an exploding population and backward agricultural techniques contribute greatly to the problem, and it seems clear to me that here we have what may almost be termed an uninhabitable region, at least until some proper farming techniques are implemented, and the inhabitants stop fighting each other long enough for some infrastructure to take root. And yet none of these things happens because every time East Africa shows the world once again that it is incapable of looking after itself, the developed world pitches in with oceans of cash to fix it.

So far the aid budget for the latest crisis stands at $2,013,059,376 in tax money, or enough for about $15 for each of the 139,719,295 who call this congenial region home, with a further $612,729,918 pledged. Only about 28 million people are in need of emergency food though, so that brings the total up to $94 per person. $94! Anywhere else, you have to work for that kind of money. Since 2000, Ethiopia alone has received roughly $1.2bn per year in foreign aid, and this is discounting any charitable money. These figures beg the question of where on earth all of this money is going. Apparently not much goes towards putting seeds in the ground.

It is difficult indeed to see pictures of emaciated African children, and it is good to do one's bit, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that government aid is worse than useless, creating conditions in which people live from harvest to harvest rather than learning from the mistakes of any one of the previous famines and continuing to ignore the simple equation of hunger: Constant Sexual Activity + Desert + Tribal Warfare = Starvation.

So why are great chunks removed from our wages almost on an annual basis just to be thrown into the vast money-pit of Africa? It's not as if we don't have problems of our own. One might even feel good about it if it actually made any difference. I believe it is time to stop this farcical business of pointless "food assistance". By all means, give through a charity, but the government is not there to bail out the citizens of other countries who can't run their affairs properly. It is the primary function of government to look after its own - that's why we have one, and more to the point, why Ethiopia has one too. However, somewhat like the benefits-addicts which plague and disfigure British cities, what is there in it for East Africa to sort itself out when it can rely on such incredible sums from countries and continents that actually function? It is time for Africa to start standing on its own two feet.

With thanks to Guy Somerset for a couple of links.

Modern Major-General?

In 1878 W.S. Gilbert penned the words of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General in which he poked fun at the imbalance between erudition and actual military prowess of senior officers in the late 19th century British Army. Such was the importance of a good classical education that very little time was set aside for the actual learning of tactics, and if an officer was fortunate enough not to see much action, he would quite likely be no more a military man than the ghastly Lord Sugar is a credit to the Upper House. How far away that world seems now when we see hordes of barely literate roughs tumbling through the school gates waving around their n A* A-Level grades which nevertheless aren't quite enough to get them a place reading Crayon Sharpening at Luton Reformed Poly.

Perusing my Twitter feed today, I noticed a missive from an officer of the Students' Union of King's College London - an reputable and upstanding institution - telling the world that "pulchritudinous" is a noun. That a post-graduate student at one of the UK's leading universities should not only be ignorant of the difference between a noun and an adjective, but willingly show everyone that ignorance is a good illustration of the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in now, for along with the rest of the country, Our Education System Is Broken.

Naturally we have heard much about this over the last week - badly (or even barely) educated thugs from the more rioty end of town charging about setting fire to things is a cause for much soul-searching among the Guardianistas, but they've got it all the wrong way 'round. Why does nobody now boast about being able to write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform? Because the state education and exam system is so busy trying to make sure every ineducable basket case feels included and special that those who want to actually learn rather than merely be taught how to get an A are stymied at every turn. To prove my point, I have a challenge for you. Go and find the closest jubilant A-Level student and ask them to describe, even in the vaguest possible way, the plot of any two Shakespeare plays except Macbeth. I bet you they couldn't tell you. In fact, ask about Macbeth too. They can probably barely remember that.

Now this is not to say that British schoolchildren are stupid. Far from it - many are vastly more worldly and well-read than I am, but the opportunity is not given to them to develop, purely as a result of the tyranny of the exam boards. These monstrous institutions set the public exams, like A-Levels and GCSEs and are paid to do so by the government. What a surprise then that 98% of A-Level students passed. Education statistics looking a bit woeful? Somebody whizz 'round to OCR or Edexcel and have a word... Even worse is the fact that somehow these clowns (who, remember, cannot even get the questions right) have managed to acquire a monopoly on intelligence. The only way to get a good job now is to have the right results. Don't have three As and a 2:1? Enjoy your box, you smelly homeless person.

The contagion has even spread to our universities, and more so now that they are commercial operations. The concern for league table rankings in all parts of the education system means that nobody actually learns anything from it - they just tick the boxes their teachers tell them to.

So how to fix Britain? Easy. Burn down the exam boards and have schools set their own tests. Such education built the world's biggest empire, but now look at us. Exam boards, j'accuse!

Crime and Punishment

Goodness me, but don't we have a great furore this morning? Following the sentencing of various morally deficient rioters, people are starting to protest that these sentences are too harsh. This, I'm sure you will remember, comes after a week of demands to ensure that anybody conviceted of involvement in the riots was shown a bit of tough love, and it's this kind of wishy-washy pussy-footing about the issue that got Britain into the mess we're in today. A great deal of our problems can be put down to politicians and the public in general not having the moral conviction to carry through their aims. Get a grip! If you decide to do something, stick to your guns, or those same guns will be turned against you.

A main point of contention in this debate surrounds the fates of Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw, both jailed for four years for inciting violence on Facebook. Apparently, the fact that no rioting or looting resulted from this incitement should be considered in their favour. I say that no matter how staggering a criminal's ineptitude at actually committing a crime, he remains a danger to society through his attitude, just as if he had succeeded in his nefarious plans. "But four years is such a long time!" wail the apologists. "Such a sentence will ruin their lives!" Assuming they even had fine and upstanding lives in the first place, a willingness to destroy other people's livelihoods for a bit of fun deserves the ruin of your own. As for those who whine about rehabilitation, if there is one thing we should learn from the riots, it is that the criminal element holds no more regard for our pifflingly useless attempts to steer them onto the straight and narrow with a couple of months in a nice comfortable chokey than it does for the victims of its muggings and rapes.

Stick 'em away for a good long time, and if they do it again, put them away for longer. And for goodness' sake, stop letting them watch TV while they're in. It's not a holiday.

We Hold this Money to be Self-Evident

Continuing my commendably civic concern for the political fallout of last week's riots across England, I note with some chagrin that the dastardly bankers are coming under fire again, particularly on Twitter. "How can you condemn looters when the bankers looted our country and got away with it?" cry the shrill voices. The reason, dear readers, is that "bankers" did nothing of the sort. Indeed, it was more or less inevitable that credit would be extended too far as a result of the nature of modern economics. Allow me to explain.

Fiat Money

In 1971 Richard Nixon ended the dollar's last link with gold, effectively bringing the era of the Gold Standard to a close. Since then, all world currencies, but most importantly the reserve currencies, have floated against each other to a greater or lesser degree. Since money now has no physical anchor, it is intrinsically worthless and means something only because we believe it does. Money therefore now exists primarily as computer data, and can as a result be summoned in and out of existence at the push of a button. Moreover, since the money used to buy stock, shares, derivatives, bonds, gilts or any number of other financial instruments is worthless, these investments have no true monetary worth either. This is why Facebook can be valued at a sum out of all proportion to reality, and global debt now stands at $126 trillion, or just over 200% of global GDP. To put it another way, the entire world would have to devote every single penny to reducing debt for more than two years to do away with it. Evidently there is no way this can ever be paid off, and it is when you get into this situation, where non-existent assets attract huge values and debt is meaningless that the whole system starts to creak. So why do financiers allow such a thing to happen? Well, the simple answer is they don't, at least not actively. The primary reason is that

People (not bankers) are Greedy

That's right, you read correctly. The vast majority of people in the developed world keep their money in banks. Why? Evidently they are not safe places to do this - banks have been failing since their invention. No, most people keep their money in banks because they are greedy, and they want the interest. But that's it. That's all they think about. But think now for a minute. Why do banks pay interest? Where does the money come from? I'll tell you. Banks lend each other money and make investments with your money. As a fee for the use of your money, they pay you interest. And it's not just liquid assets that people muck about with. Banks frequently lend money and give credit - you tell them that you will pay them back the full amount, plus a bit in interest at some future date. They lend to you because these days that is where a lot of the revenues of a high street bank come from - it's their job. But then if you fail to pay the banks back, they come and take your house or your stuff to balance the payment. If enough people do this, suddenly the bank has no more money and cannot lend. Nobody can borrow money, so they stop buying things, and those who owe money have their house repossessed. That is a credit crunch. The important thing to note, however, is it is not the fault of the banks. They may have extended too much credit - been too credulous - but that is not wrongdoing. The debtors who failed to make good on their loans are at fault, as they have failed to keep the promise they made. If you require bankers to do your banking for you, do not whinge and moan if they encounter trouble because you fail to honour your responsibilities. As with all things, banking and finance in general constitute a two-way effort.

Everybody Is Too Rich For Their Own Good

Almost everybody in the UK has more than enough money, by which I mean money critical to survival. The UN categorises one of the markers of poverty as not owning a television. I do not own a television, but I am no poorer because of it, as a TV is not necessary to survival. Once everybody has enough to eat, well and good, but there are many people with a lot more money than that. And what do you do when you have everything? What does the upper-middle class do with its spare cash? It invests it, in any number of different things. Property is a favourite, and financial vehicles are popular too. But all this money swilling around simply feeds the two problems above. For a start, it doesn't really mean anything, and secondly it all feeds the behemoth of global finance. It's all a huge circle made of hot air and optimism, so if you don't like bankers sending your money on this merry-go-round, don't put it in a bank, and don't spend more than you earn. It's not that hard. Otherwise, stop whining and learn the rules of the game.

David Starkey and the Foot in Mouth

The riots across England last week have, being quelled for now, been subjected to all sorts of analysis and reasoning, of which a particularly outspoken thread was to be found in David Starkey on Newsnight. His words have created an entire school of meta-analysis about racism and racial stereotyping, with Twitter being alive with calls to arrest him or otherwise silence this noted historian.Toby Young has, to the best of my knowledge, been the only person to suggest that racism may not have been at the top of Starkey's agenda in his Telegraph blog, for which he has been roundly lambasted, and this is unfortunate, because it shows that Britons, despite all the tough talk of the past week are no more ready to engage in a realistic debate about how such riots might be avoided in future than we were previously.

I will fess up to being on Toby Young's side here, as I do not believe that David Starkey was being racist. Rather, he was simply insufficiently prepared to back up the argument he had chosen, resulting in an ill-advised simplification of the issue. What he was getting at, as was made perfectly evident by his reference to Enoch Powell, was the failure of certain elements of the afro-Caribbean and Ghanaian immigrant populations properly to assimilate in their adopted culture, falling back instead on a semi-indigenous culture primarily informed by so-called "gangsta" culture, typified by a casual attitude towards violence and drug use and a truly astonishing degree of materialism.

The basis of most arguments posited against David Starkey is that in saying that such a culture has a damaging effect on youth, he was being racist. While Starkey was certainly inadequately equipped to discuss gangsta rap, speaking against it is not racist. As he said himself, it is an issue of culture, not of skin colour, and explicitly stated that unlike Powell, he did not consider the black man to hold the whip hand over the white man, rather that the musically-informed lifestyle of certain elements unprivileged black youth had come to hold sway over underprivileged children and adolescents in many areas, regardless of race or ethnicity.

In a forum such as Newsnight where expansive explanation of a point is not possible, it was foolish of Starkey to air such unfashionable views - all that resulted was a shouting match at the end of which everybody felt aggrieved and nobody was able to put their points across properly. However, he did raise an important question: to what degree is the culture peculiar to the majority of those involved in the rioting responsible for the evident decline in moral and behavioural standards among the youth of the underclass? My money's on "quite a lot".