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23 april 2011, where there be giants
Saturday 23rd April 2011
With family and festivities behind us, we’re heading up north in the morning, for a short camping trip. My other half, being of the “if you're not in new york, you're camping out” disposition, is none too pleased about the expedition, and will head home after one night. I’m more sanguine, as I camped pretty much every summer as a child - though with youth movement not parents, and so though it made the biggest of impressions on me, that perhaps was not the canvas. Meanwhile the kids, who we’re doing it for, are so excited they can hardly speak, and I’m very much looking forward to some time away with them, especially as rather too often when we’re at…
16 april 2011, signing palestine’s birth certificate
Saturday 16th April 2011
30 years of negotiation between israel, the arabs (palestinians) and america (rest of the world) had two peaks: camp david 1977, successful; and sharm el sheikh 2000, less so. After that, israel turned from moderate to rightist, america from facilitator to observer, and the palestinians to authoritarianism and civil war. Progress became unilateralist, as israel withdrew from lebanon, and then from gaza. Unilateralism replaced land for peace. Both formulae originated on the left, and were then adopted by the right, the wall following the same pattern: it was originally a leftist attempt to nudge forward a palestinian state by drawing borders that no longer existed on a “good fences make good neighbours” basis. In 2000, yasser arafat sought to take…
15 april 2011, the last call
Friday 15th April 2011
I have just filled in what will probably be the last census ever in the uk. This decennial counting of the people dates back to 1801, when britain, then including all of ireland, had some 9.4m people. Today, we’re around 62m, and the cost of counting them is some £500m, mainly accounted for by the 30, 000 people it takes to do it. In a world of highly-mobile people, where 500m voluntarily give more information to facebook, at virtually no cost, there is a general recognition that the system is mildly ludicrous. So, as the country’s statistics office cuts costs all round, the probability is that this is the last exercise of its kind. Answering the census was pretty boring,…
10 april 2011, the power of our upbringing
Sunday 10th April 2011
I had a bet on the grand national on saturday; in fact, I had several. Worse, I explained it all to the kids and let them pick a horse each too. When we got back from an excellent and sunny day at shugborough hall, we played the race we’d taped (or I guess these days we must say skyplussed) and the youngest’s 150-1 shot, santa’s son, was pretty much up front for the first half, as he and his brother started planning all the things they were going to buy with their winnings. It was heart in mouth stuff – if he lost, dreadful disappointment; if he won, a life of gambling as he tried to recreate that first triumph.…
5 april 2011, the politics of everyone getting something
Monday 4th April 2011
On the other side of the fence, I always wondered how a rich country like the uk could possibly claim a slice of regional funding which was always, in my understanding, intended to redistribute money to poorer eu countries where investment in infrastructure would pay massive dividends in building up the internal market, which the goods and services of those richer countries would be very much in line to fill. And how much more disparities were amplified when the new member states joined. Now, 43% of the eu’s total output, and some 75% of investment in research and innovation is concentrated in just 14% of its territory, the pentagon between london, hamburg, munich, milan and paris. The statistics bear this…
26 march 2011, let’s ignore the rise of the right
Saturday 26th March 2011
Fear is rising that a new wave of far-right parties seems to be breaking on europe’s shores. In france, ever the leader, the national front’s next generation le pen looks increasingly serious about a rerun of the 2002 presidential election, where it came second; the same placing as austria’s freedom party, which has survived well the bizarre death of its last leader. Late to the party but now constant is holland, where geert wilders too lies second, all but part of government; and I have written before (12 april 2010) of the chilling rise in hungary of jobbik, to which we can now add a parallel story in its linguistic cousin, the true finns, who may yet join government. Denmark’s…
19 march 2011, the art of taxation
Saturday 19th March 2011
For an awfully long time the european commission has been plugging away at the awfully named common consolidated corporate tax base, but the new integrationist spurt on the economic governance front has given this new life. The eu’s history is one of each crisis leading to the jolting forward of ever closer union, and this euro crisis is no exception. Many immediately elide this policy with a common tax rate (e.g. 12%), which it isn’t. Rather it is a common system of calculating the corporate (not personal) tax rate, applying consistency to the world of exceptions and methodologies each country has. It’s a precondition to a common rate, but does not bring one about: ireland could still undercut everyone else…
16 march 2011, son of japan
Wednesday 16th March 2011
My eldest, nine, is just discovering the real world. He’s absolutely there science and geography-wise, but is just now discovering news, and beginning to understand that things happen. I tried to get him in front of a tv the day mubarak fell in egypt, but I suspect the first big thing he really remembers will be the japanese earthquake. We watched an early video together on the web, and he’s had a million and one questions we’ve tried to answer. He wrote it up in his own blog (the first one that’s not been about him/school) and he has been patiently trying to explain the whole thing to my second-born, seven. A couple of nights ago we caught him long…
10 march 2011, pensioned off
Thursday 10th March 2011
Whilst our erstwhile peers in the emerging (or should we now call them growth) markets squirrel away savings for their old age, leading to the massive savings glut and global imbalances, the west struggles impossibly to balance turbo consumerism with something to live on in our senior years. For some generations now the gap has been bridged by state pensions and, for those in the public sector, extremely generous pension provisions justified by wages that once upon a time were lower than the private sector's. Today though public and private are increasingly shades of grey. We have known for some time that such largesse is totally unsustainable, although attempts to remedy have been slow and painful. This is because those…
4 march 2011, strong vigilance
Friday 4th March 2011
There you go then, interest rates are on the up again. It’s been eminently predictable (28 jan)for a while now, and so as the ecb traffic light turns to green, no-one should be surprised that the central banks will hold back the tide no longer. I remember well getting to work on 9 august 2007, to find that we had injected some 94 billion euros into the system to keep the money markets operational, and how from seeming fantastical and revolutionary it became within hours what the world did for the next few years. Again now frankfurt leads the way, but it’s echoes across europe will quickly follow. The governor of the danish central bank once said that outside…
20 february 2011, change, unfortunately, voted down
Sunday 20th February 2011
In a couple of months the uk will have its first nationwide referendum since 1974. Knowing the population’s innate conservatism, the then-government joined the eu first, and only subsequently asked if the status quo should be retained, “do you think the uk should stay in the common market ?". The now-government is using the same ruse on a quirky plan for england’s largest 12 provincial cites to have elected mayors, first putting them in post for a year, and then asking the question. The big one though, about moving to the “alternative vote” electoral system for general elections, is tellingly different, with a paraphrase of the question being “do you want to explode three hundred years of history and…
12 february 2011, strasbourg: bring the roof down
Saturday 12th February 2011
A couple of years ago the roof fell in on the european parliament building in strasbourg, literally. It was plastered up, and the travelling circus that gives the parliament such a bad name continued. That was a tragedy, as to an ever larger degree it is europe, rather than national parliaments, that determine legislation, and a directly-elected institution needs deeper roots and credibility. 90% of lawmakers have now come round to this, catching up with the rest of us. However strasbourg week will continue as long as france doggedly refuses to concede, and everyone else holds up their hands and says it needs a unanimously-agreed treaty change. These do though come along more often than most people imagine (30…