Who is next ? United Kingdom plc, that's whoby john of gwent
Did you see Newsnight last night on BBC2 ? If not, you missed the most spectacular news scoop of the century. Only they don't know they have it. In a far ranging in depth analysis of the credit crunch and interviews with the mjor players that only the BBC can stage in the way it does, those who were running last nights programme revealed a few rather interesting facts.
Hands up anyone who remembers Black Wednesday ? Now keep your hands up if you were running a small business at the time. And leave them up if you were part way through the delivery of a major project to a large multi-national in the financial or industrial sector .....
.... Now then, of the small band of us left with our hands in the air, who amongst you watched Norman Lamont shove the interst rate to 22% at 2pm in order to fight off George Sorros' bet that we'd be out of the Narrow band ERM by tea-time. And who amongst you expected that the large multinational that owed you at least ten grand was about to go bust thanks to that crippling interest rate and take your small business with it as a casualty of war .....
Well I still have my hand up and I believe I see my old mucker GA there at the back has his hand in the air too. Because we were both right out there in the line of fire when the Germans decided to teach Norman Lamont a lesson or two about European Economics back then in 1993.
And so it was with little surprise that I read yesterday that shares were in freefall again thanks to the Germans saying one thing and then doing another behind our backs. And last night on newsnight they even sent their ambassador to the Newsnight Studio. And when questioned he said 'he understood Angela Merkel perfectly and perhaps you suffered a mistake in the translation'.
No, I don't really think there was a mistake in translation, Mister Ambassador. Well not in the translation from German to English. I recall your minister of finance on BBC1 in 1993. I remember his bluster and outrage when replying to accusations of collusion at the Bundesbank to destroy the British Economy. And I remember his words spoken in German on the Astra Analogue Sat-Eins-Plus station later that night. For in those days you thought no-one in Britain could receive your television signals, much less understand them. Now to give you credit, you have not made the same mistake this time, but how you must have cringed when your plan was exposed by newsnight, and how you must have gloated when you realised the fools were not 'on to you'.
What am I talking about, I hear you say ? Go find a copy of the programme somehow and watch it.
About half way through a long and very very boring litany of bankers being interviewed saying how sorry they are, and other apologists for the mess wer are in right now, Newsnight shows a graph. On its vertical axis is a measuure of the amout of personal debt each member of the population of the countries affected by this financial situation is in. On the horizontal axis is a measure of the amount of corporate debt the country's businesses and em,ployers are in.
Guess who is top of the list in both cases. Guess which country is out there streets ahead of all the others top of the tree and most dangerously exposed and most likely to take the hardest knock from the continuation of this situation ?
You don't need to guess at all, do you. It's UK plc that's out there most exposed of all, and we lead by quite a few city blocks.
And then Newsnight stumbled on the scoop of the year without knowing it. In posing the question "what is different between us and the united states, what is going on in Europe that is not the same as what is going on in the United States", the journalist reading the lines with all the enthusiasm of the man Maggie found to announce military losses during the Falklands conflict revealed the answer.
The United States are a Federal Unon with a Federal Financial and Legislative structure overseeing the individual states. The European Union has no such equivalent federal legislatitive and financial instutution. Or to be specific, we have the institution all right, but the individual governments of the member states can only be persuaded, and cannot be coerced into taking action, and above all are free to act independently in their own interest.
In other words the only way out of this credit crunch and the disaster it is causing daily is ever closer political union. Those were the very words used and no-one, absolutely no-one even bothered to take that theme any further.
Germany has been plotting its revenge for the snubbing it got over the Lisbon treaty for some time. I say that over the previous weekend it put its plan into motion.
Hands up anyone who remembers Black Wednesday ? Now keep your hands up if you were running a small business at the time. And leave them up if you were part way through the delivery of a major project to a large multi-national in the financial or industrial sector .....
.... Now then, of the small band of us left with our hands in the air, who amongst you watched Norman Lamont shove the interst rate to 22% at 2pm in order to fight off George Sorros' bet that we'd be out of the Narrow band ERM by tea-time. And who amongst you expected that the large multinational that owed you at least ten grand was about to go bust thanks to that crippling interest rate and take your small business with it as a casualty of war .....
Well I still have my hand up and I believe I see my old mucker GA there at the back has his hand in the air too. Because we were both right out there in the line of fire when the Germans decided to teach Norman Lamont a lesson or two about European Economics back then in 1993.
And so it was with little surprise that I read yesterday that shares were in freefall again thanks to the Germans saying one thing and then doing another behind our backs. And last night on newsnight they even sent their ambassador to the Newsnight Studio. And when questioned he said 'he understood Angela Merkel perfectly and perhaps you suffered a mistake in the translation'.
No, I don't really think there was a mistake in translation, Mister Ambassador. Well not in the translation from German to English. I recall your minister of finance on BBC1 in 1993. I remember his bluster and outrage when replying to accusations of collusion at the Bundesbank to destroy the British Economy. And I remember his words spoken in German on the Astra Analogue Sat-Eins-Plus station later that night. For in those days you thought no-one in Britain could receive your television signals, much less understand them. Now to give you credit, you have not made the same mistake this time, but how you must have cringed when your plan was exposed by newsnight, and how you must have gloated when you realised the fools were not 'on to you'.
What am I talking about, I hear you say ? Go find a copy of the programme somehow and watch it.
About half way through a long and very very boring litany of bankers being interviewed saying how sorry they are, and other apologists for the mess wer are in right now, Newsnight shows a graph. On its vertical axis is a measuure of the amout of personal debt each member of the population of the countries affected by this financial situation is in. On the horizontal axis is a measure of the amount of corporate debt the country's businesses and em,ployers are in.
Guess who is top of the list in both cases. Guess which country is out there streets ahead of all the others top of the tree and most dangerously exposed and most likely to take the hardest knock from the continuation of this situation ?
You don't need to guess at all, do you. It's UK plc that's out there most exposed of all, and we lead by quite a few city blocks.
And then Newsnight stumbled on the scoop of the year without knowing it. In posing the question "what is different between us and the united states, what is going on in Europe that is not the same as what is going on in the United States", the journalist reading the lines with all the enthusiasm of the man Maggie found to announce military losses during the Falklands conflict revealed the answer.
The United States are a Federal Unon with a Federal Financial and Legislative structure overseeing the individual states. The European Union has no such equivalent federal legislatitive and financial instutution. Or to be specific, we have the institution all right, but the individual governments of the member states can only be persuaded, and cannot be coerced into taking action, and above all are free to act independently in their own interest.
In other words the only way out of this credit crunch and the disaster it is causing daily is ever closer political union. Those were the very words used and no-one, absolutely no-one even bothered to take that theme any further.
Germany has been plotting its revenge for the snubbing it got over the Lisbon treaty for some time. I say that over the previous weekend it put its plan into motion.
Excellent article as usual JOG and yes I remember the events you refer to all too clearly.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work.
please no more anti german tirades. The war ended in 1945 and germany was occupied by the two super powers until 1991 and is now just controlled by one, which not only keeps 50,000 troops there but owns much of the film, print and news media. Angela Merkel's strings are pulled by people in New York and Virginia. if you need to blame anyone for the financial collapse then blame the spivs and speculators in wall street , thats where the blame lies. The Germans are just following orders...but they dont originate in Berlin I assure you.
ReplyDeleteThe book Disappearing Britain, The EU and the Death of Local Government by Lindsay Jenkins suggests towards the end that we should be wary of what Germany is up to.
ReplyDeleteThe EUSSR project requires the nations of Europe to be split up into regions. England will be split up into 9 regions, for example. Clearly there will be a large cost, significant bureaucracy and political infighting involved in setting up the regions. As "luck" would have it Germany is already split up into 16 Länder, which are all conveniently the optimum size for EU regions. Germany therefore does not have anything like the amount of effort to expend in setting up its regions because they're already in place. Advantage Germany.
Germany is also promoting the German language in the border regions of neighbouring states. By spreading its language Germany is also spreading its culture. The greater the spread the more influence Germany will have over its neighbours.
Germany is on the rise and any financial (or otherwise) misfortunes suffered by other European countries will be to Germany's advantage.
What did Stan Boardman say?
ReplyDelete