It’s that quadrennial time again when our football supporters and top players, with their WAGS in tow, leave our shores for foreign climes.
Far from leaving us in peace, they get at us by dominating TV and radio airwaves with their inane chanting and drunken rowdiness.
Definition of the World Cup: People getting excited by people getting excited.
William Hague and David Cameron have a chance to exploit the bitter split between Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Sarko wants to set up an economic government for the European Union — a council of the eurozone — to regulate the EU’s “economy”. Merkel is set against such a move, which would be heavily resisted in Germany.
Note the intrusion of eurozone affairs into the EU. Britain, Sweden and Denmark, along with newer members of the EU, are not in the eurozone at all, although some have applied. It has to be said, it’s very unlikely that any of these applicants will be granted access to the top table. Hungary’s woes, made public last week, have certainly put the kibosh on its future membership.
Britain should not be hesitant in all this. It’s in the UK’s interests to break up the big, cumbersome bloc of Western European nations and its “European Model” that is likely to retard growth worldwide for decades to come.
As suggested here before, Britain should aim to drive a wedge between the eurozone proper and the wider European Union.
A new loose bloc, without a common currency, involving some northern European states: UK, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic and Ireland, would challenge the spendthrift power of the rest of the eurozone.
Is the Coalition up to such bold politics? Will Nick Clegg abandon his europhilia in the face of its slow-motion collapse?
These are questions that will tell us much about the sustainability of our new Government.
Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, was reported by Francis Fukuyama to have told President George W. Bush that “deficits don’t matter”. At the time, even large deficits were easily handled by selling American bonds to China and by incoming investments in dollar assets.
It’s not so easy today, even though China has partly reversed its retreat from the dollar. It has nowhere else to go now that the eurozone is in its death throes.
Even so, the idea that deficits don’t matter means that governments’ stock of public debt grows year by year and has to be paid for through increasing interest payments. The danger point is breached when a debt compound spiral adds costs that can’t be met out of income or yet more borrowing.
Venice has been selling off its Palaces (palazzos) to all-comers just to service its spiralling debts. Britain may approach that point within this Parliament as national debt hits 100% of GDP.
But back to Dick Cheney. He was also the prime encourager of US involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Trillions of American treasure has been spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, making the United States one of the world’s deficit basket cases.
Now we hear that the company Cheney ran, Halliburton, was the supplier of the faulty cement for the BP oil well and is deeply implicated in the current Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.
Is Dick Cheney the worst disaster to happen to the United States in recent history?
Annoyment of the Week
Two or three months ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek diary piece about a building near where I live named Casting House. I imagined Cheryl Cole popping in and out of a back door and a queue of would-be starlets.
Last week, behind that rear entrance, a store of road-making materials blew up. A enormous plume of black smoke caused by burning bitumen soon hung over the adjoining residential area, including Syntagma Towers. The cloud could be seen from as far away as Dawlish.
Fifteen fire engines and 84 firefighters burst upon our tranquil scene. Many of us were evacuated by the police because of toxic fumes and the danger of a “massive explosion” of gas cylinders stored on-site.
Was Casting House getting its own back on me for casting aspersions against its industrial honour?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Met Office woes are reprised. Despite the rash of criticism over its performance, after forecasting the direct opposite of what our weather actually turns out to be, the Met Office Wet Office has just got worse.
Hoteliers on the English Riviera are complaining again that the bad weather forecasts for two recent sunny Bank holiday weekends, have cost them a fortune in lost revenues.
During the recent ash cloud disaster for the airline industry, guess which institution was gathering and number-crunching the data for Europe and beyond. Yes, our old chums at the Met Office.
As far as anyone can remember, when they operated off the Air Ministry roof with a few thermometers and a rain gauge, they were a national treasure. They even got the weather spot on for the D-Day landings.
Those of us who live in the West Country suspect it was their move to Exeter that broke the back of this once fine body of cloud watchers. Some believe that many of the boffins are lounging around on the beaches rather than compiling their charts.
Actually, it seems to be their involvement with international affairs and global problems that has destroyed Met Office credibility.
The United Nations and NASA relied heavily on Met Office-sponsored research at the University of East Anglia for the climate change outrage, just as the European Union trusted them with Icelandic volcanic eruptions.
Megalomania probably comes near to the truth.
Quote of the Week
“Quiet effectiveness is what I aspire to. There has not been some frenetic round of the media. This is one of the first interviews I have done.”
David Cameron, speaking to The Sunday Times
Have a good week.
John Evans
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