With winter approaching I need to take stock of how I am doing…relative to how I hoped to be doing at the start of the year. Traditionally my mid-year appraisal covers successes, surprises and failures…and from an analysis of the failures emerges a revised strategy for the rest of the year. My score stands at 8 successes, 2 surprises and 4 failures.

Number One on my Success List is my blogging. At the start of the year I had little idea whether it would be possible to deliver 365 daily 1000 word blogs of an acceptable quality. With over 70% completed…261/365…I am now confident that I can complete the task…and that the task was worthwhile.

At No.2 and No.3 on my success list come Heidi and John Papworth. This One Man and His Work is better off for having withdrawn from their suffocating embrace. At No.4 is my financial retrenchment. Mr McCawber would be proud of me. My regular outgoings no longer exceed my income. My financial foundations are secure. My two thousand pound private loan from Mr Burt for the third Magpie Sagas book has been repaid and my five hundred pound Good Yacht Guide balance on my Neame Designs account has been paid off…and the account closed down.

At No.5 is the transfer of ownership of the good ship Vemara into my name which took place this week…as well as the good relations established with Mssrs David & Martin Hutchings. At No.6 is resolving the dispute with Mr Roud and the re-mooring of Vemara on the River Rother. At No.7 is agreeing with Berni Fiddimore to reopen dialogue on the Magpie Sagas Project after a 12 month dispute. At No.8 is re-establishing good relations with Cynthia Battersby which allows progress to recommence on the Connie Lindqvist Project.

There are two items on my Surprise List. No.1 is Climate Change…at the start of the year I had no idea that I would be devoting time to this subject during 2006. No.2 is Summer in Stockholm which was not on my agenda at the start of the year…warmest thanks to my son Nicholas John. But now let me turn to the year’s failures.

There are four items on my Failure List. At No.1 is my failure to secure the forty thousand kronor…£3000…funding I wanted before moving to Lund University for six months to complete my Fil.Kand degree.

At No.2 is my failure to find acceptable storage arrangements for my stuff…and Connie’s stuff and Academic Inn Books...stocks stored at Rye Harbour, Vemara, Wittersham and Winchelsea Road.

At No.3 is the fact that I no longer wish to live on Vemara but have yet to move to an apartment. At No.4 is my failure to start trading in Swedish Kronor and European Industrial Shares. These four failures are related…because they were predicated upon receiving the money promised by JAK.

JAK’s failure to deliver on their February 2006 promise to provide an unsecured loan of SEK 75 000 in April 2006 lies behind my failures not only under No.1 but also 2, 3 and 4. However a promise has now been made to provide the unsecured funds requested once I am resident in Sweden.

Storage under No.2 was to be paid for from the JAK funding. The financial risk of moving to Lund under No.3 was to be met by six months of Forward Living Capability on account or in pre-paid rent. Work on No.4 was deemed to be dependent on stable and efficient working conditions.

My revised strategy is to seek an apartment in Rye immediately to meet my winter needs…October to March…and permit me to consolidate my stuff so that subsequent moves into commercial storage becomes much easier. My apartment rent will be met from Housing Benefit and the savings on storage costs offset by the loss of Housing Benefit for Mooring Fees. Last week I set the Ryesingers network to work on my behalf by letting Lesley Brownbill know that I was giving serious consideration to wintering in Rye…if I could find a suitable apartment.

It then makes sense for me to formally apply for a place at Lund University for the Spring Term 2007…applications are due in by mid-October 2006...once registered I will have access to the University Housing lists. I have also decided to explore the possibility of grants for my Economic History Studies in Lund. At year end after four months of Cultura income I will see how things stand…and tithe a portion of any wealth to my IG-Index Fund for 2007.

Most days I skim the Obituaries in The Times…fighter pilots from the Second World War, unknown Hollywood actresses, a geriatric civil servant…but seldom anyone of interest to me. So I find myself asking about the criteria for their selection. John Seymour and Nicholas Albery got themselves full-page obituaries in several of the daily papers and John Papworth might warrant one…he has been in the news.

But the only obituary I am likely to get is the one I write for myself…and no paper will print that. Perhaps from now on my purpose in life should be to get obituarised.

But last Monday…September 11th 2006…The Times’ Obituaries Register featured a right-wing paramilitary leader murdered after lifting the lid on the Colombian drugs trade, an esteemed historian who promoted understanding of the deep roots of Christians in the Arab world and a Jesuit champion of the social role of the Catholic Church.

On careful inspection the page was contrived for 9/11 because the Arab Historian died at the end of July, the Brazilian Jesuit died at the end of August and the Paramilitary Commander was murdered in 2004…although his remains only turned up this month. Yet it made for an interesting read as those involved might otherwise have been up for a Nobel Peace Prize, a Right Livelihood Award…or one of the levels of Dante’s Inferno.

Professor Nicolas Ziadeh was born in Damascus in 1907…son of a Palestinian Railway Clerk from Nazareth. He worked in Jerusalem under the British mandate until 1935 when he won a scholarship to study History in London.

Ziadeh described himself as non-political but thought that Nasser’s form of Arab Nationalism had destroyed the hopes of his generation for a more democratic and tolerant society. He was also disappointed that Muslim Arabs had doubts about the patriotism of their Christian compatriots. The Pope should read his book Christianity and the Arabs.

Archbishop Luciano Mendes de Almeida was born in 1930 and was recruited by the Jesuits at 17. In 1976 he was the first Brazilian Jesuit to be appointed bishop. He was President of the influential Brazilian Bishops Conference ( CNBB ) from 1979 to 1994.

Mendes de Almeida was one of a group of socially conscious bishops who worked to put Liberation Theology into practice by dedicating themselves to the poor and the oppressed and involving the Roman Catholic Church in the lives and problems of ordinary people. Pope John Paul II disapproved and in 1985 ordered the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff to stop teaching for a year because of his denunciations of capitalism.

Carlos Castaño Gil would seem to be a most unlikely candidate for a Times Obituary. He was one of 12 children born in 1965 on a small farm in Gomez Plata district near Amalfi in the northern Colombian department of Antioquia. His life as a killer began when he was recruited into a self-defence militia organised by his brother and financed by the drugs boss Pablo Escobar to fight the guerrillas of the Magdalena River Valley.

His organisational skills and ruthlessness helped him to rise quickly through the ranks. But his group fell out with Escobar…allegedly…went over to the opposition and helped track Escobar down to a house in Medellín where he was shot dead in December 1993.

In 2004 Castaño was killed…execution-style…with a bullet in the head…allegedly…while negotiations were going on between paramilitary leaders and the Government of President Álvaro Uribe. The President had offered thousands of right-wing gunmen who dominated large parts of Colombia the chance to lay down their arms.

They could return to civilian life if they accepted a degree of responsibility for the atrocities committed during the years of conflict with the left-wing guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Talks began in late 2002 and until just before his death Castaño was the paramilitaries’ lead negotiator.

The Paramilitaries…like the Guerrillas…financed their operations with drug trafficking and extortion. They became immensely wealthy and influential and were useful allies in operations against the FARC and the ELN.

By the time negotiations began Castaño was coming across as a moderate who accepted the Government’s view that the paramilitaries should admit some responsibility for their crimes and pay for them with short prison sentences. He also agreed that they should hand over some of their wealth and cut their links with drug trafficking.

Castaño fate was sealed in 2001…allegedly…when he published his autobiography Mi Confesión and admitted that money for his United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia came from drug trafficking on behalf of one of Colombia’s main cocaine cartels and that he had been involved in many assassinations and massacres of innocent civilians.

But this honesty and contrition did not go down too well with his paramilitary colleagues who felt they had nothing to apologise for and had no intention of giving up their businesses. They also suspected that Castaño might have negotiated a private deal with the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Times Obituary seeks to scotch any rumours that the CIA might have whisked him off to a safe-house in Miami by insisting that ‘dental records and DNA tests indicated that the odds that the remains were not those of Carlos Castaño were a billion to one.’ But what does that prove? Here. Have a tooth and a blood sample. So the Obituary threw in an informer by the name of Monoleche for good measure who duly claimed to have taken part in the assault on the ranch where Castaño was killed. Hmmm!

The Chinese are inscrutable; the Japanese are fiendishly clever…and devilishly cruel; Americans are brash and ignorant; Europeans are untrustworthy with the French perfidious…or is that the French who claim that Albion is perfidious…the Germans pushy and rude…with no sense of humour and everyone south of the Danube is hairy and smells of garlic. So goes Imperial English Prejudice. But that is the bad news.

The good news is that a generation is growing up in England with rather different prejudices. Some of the more enlightened have discovered that Europeans from behind the Iron Curtain are clever, resourceful and hard-working. Many computer viruses started life in Bulgaria so their first stop was Rumania before piggy-backing across to Western Europe and beyond. Ten years on the Rumanians have the best anti-virus software company in the world.

Turkey is beyond the pale. The Turks kill English football supporters…and massacre Kurds. Until recently I was minded to share this prejudice. Then I visited a National Health Dentist for the first time in 30 years. Her diagnosis was not as bad as I feared…two extractions, one filling, some plaque removal and one root canal and crown job.

Only half the RC&C job remains…and with today’s Gum Numbing Technology pain is a thing of the past. However I may have spoken too soon as she plans to cut a millimetre into the gum next week to expose the nerve. But she has such lovely brown eyes that I could put up with anything. But I forgot to mention…my dentist wears an Islamic headscarf and her grandparents live in a small town a few dozen miles from Istanbul. Wonderful people the Turks.

The Poles helped the RAF win the Battle of Britain so they have always had a good press over here. Many stayed on after the war so the English Chapter of the Polish Diaspora has 82 Polish Catholic Churches, a Polish Educational Society that supports 67 Polish Saturday Schools attended by five thousand children and 113 Polish Community Centres…the biggest in Hammersmith boasting the largest Polish Library outside Poland. In four years time the daily Polish language newspaper Dziennik Polski will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. And so to immigration.

Nobody believes a word the Government says on this. The suspicion is that they are unable to tell us the truth because they don’t have the foggiest idea what it is. To dissemble you need to have some facts to dissemble with.

However a Non-Governmental Organisation called Migration Watch has been around for a while and calls it right most of the time. Under the current policy regime they predict that we will enjoy net immigration of two million over the next ten years…a rate of 200 000 a year and four times the rate in the 1990s. 80% of population growth will be immigration.

Migration Watch reports that since enlargement of the European Union, 450 000 immigrants have registered for employment…half of them from Poland…150 000 are self-employed, 100 000 are non-registered and 50 000 are dependents…30 000 National Insurance Numbers have been issued for Dependent Children. Three quarters of New Immigrants are young men, a quarter settle in London and in total 1 in every 14 UK residents was born abroad.

Poland has a population of 38 million, Rumania has 22 million…half of them rural…and Bulgaria has 8 million. Polish unemployment is 16%...Bulgaria’s 8%.

At present the UK with a population of 60 million and Ireland and Sweden with populations of less than 10 million are the only countries in Europe with open borders to the new EU members from Eastern Europe. All three seem likely to keep their commitments despite reports from Dublin of thousands of Polish Homeless and concerns about the trafficking of 700 000 prostitutes from East to West Europe.

The real crunch comes with Turkey…and for three principal reasons. Firstly size…Turkey has a population of 80 million. Secondly religion…the German Pope wishes to see a Christian Europe and most Turks are Moslem even though Turkey is a Secular State.

But thirdly…and most importantly…any proposed marriage between Turkey and the European Union begs fundamental questions about the New World Order. NATO is past its sell-by date…its raison d’être was the Cold War with Turkey included in the alliance to meet Cold War Needs.

The British Army is 100 000 strong. Apart from small deployments in Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Balkans Blair’s military legacy is Iraq and Afghanistan. During the Cold War regiments spent their time in barracks planning and training. Nowadays regiments are on Permanent Operations. Their barracks are for recuperation before the next tour of Mission Creep. Army Recruitment no longer talks about Adventure…but Combat.

America’s Geopolitical Delusions and Oil & Dollar Gunboat Politics have thrown World Diplomacy into freefall. The United States is bankrupt. Her Economic Might is an illusion…a Serial Bubble Economy with a DotCom Bubble making way for Property & Security Bubbles.

There has been no Real Growth in the US Economy for two decades…just an explosion in Overseas Debts swamping the Real Economy. America is a Failed State. She should be encouraged to evolve a new Monroe Doctrine and remove herself from the International Stage to lick her wounds and learn her lessons. She has nothing to offer the world.

The disaster of this country’s Foreign Policy for the past ten years has been its failure to see this. Turkey’s future depends upon the dawning of this realisation in Whitehall.

For the next four years Fredrik Reinfeldt will be Prime Minister of Sweden with its population of nine million. Yesterday the alliance of Reinfeldt’s Conservatives with Liberals, Christian Democrats and Centre won 178 seats in the 349-seat Swedish Parliament putting them 7-seats ahead of the Social Democrat Alliance.

The Social Democrats will still be the largest party in the parliament with 35% of the vote followed by Reinfeldt’s party with an impressive 26%...up from 15% in 2002. But victory was won in the Stockholm City Region...which casts one in five of all Swedish votes. In Stockholm 37% voted for the Conservatives and only 25% for the ruling Social Democrats.

With Proportional Representation, Minority Parties form alliances with other Opposition Parties to gain power while a Majority Party splits the opposition to stay in power. Reinfeldt succeeded where Göran Persson failed. If Cameron Tories and the Hughes LibDems formed an alliance against Brown’s New Labour for the 2009 Westminster Elections Cameron could well get a Reinfeldt Outcome under PR...but First Past The Post is something else.

English Political Commentators regularly make extravagant ideological claims for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. But the electoral reality was always that when the Gang of Four split off from the Labour Party and formed themselves into a new party any Conservative Party could have strolled to electoral victory. 20-years later the new party was taken over by the Liberal Party and ever since, the Liberal Democrats have campaigned as Not The Tories in Conservative Constituencies and Not New Labour in Labour Constituencies. This works well until you have to govern…which is now Reinfeldt’s problem. But there are others.

Social Democracy has ruled Sweden for 69 of the past 74 years building up a model state on funds accumulated by keeping out of both European wars. With the rest of Europe in ruins Sweden's industries had a huge international market and little competition. In the seventies the money ran out so Sweden started borrowing. Meanwhile it kept the economy going…and exports strong…by steadily depreciating the kronor…down a third over the 20 years.

However Reinfeldt has two things going for him. Firstly Sweden has given an approving nod to a generation change…not something Swedes do lightly…with the new 41-year old Swedish Prime Minister 20-years younger than the old one. Reinfeldt would have had a tougher fight on his hands against an Anna Lindh or a Mona Sahlin.

Secondly Reinfeldt pointed his finger at a glaring problem with the Swedish Model…one that Swedes have been reluctant to admit. Sweden preaches the Protestant Ethic with Work as the foundation of their society and Full Employment as their pride and joy.

But reality has been less and less people working for more and more scroungers as the Social Democrats imposed levies on high incomes...so high in fact that effective tax rates were often over 60% after Employee Contributions. This tax money was redistributed fairly indiscriminately to both the deserving and undeserving poor. Add in the generous Unemployment Benefits and for sizeable parts of the population work is no longer an attractive Lifestyle Option. OECD calculates that the average Swede clocks on for only 35/52 weeks a year.

The Social Democrats have also shown indifference to the plight of small businesses and entrepreneurs preferring to rely on Saltsjöbaden Concordats with the big Multinational Swedish Corporations…Ericsson, SKF, ABB and Volvo...and their labour unions. True unemployment in Sweden is running closer to 20% than the official 6% but this is being masked by political correctness and statistical deceit. The only policy response that the Social Democrats have come up with…supplied by their alliance partners on the left…has been to create 200 000 new Public Sector Jobs. Reinfeldt made this poverty of ideas…and distrust of Private Initiative…a principal theme of his Election Campaign.

Young people entering the Work-Force over the past few years have become increasingly aware that Sweden is not working for them…but for just a few privileged groups favoured by the Social Democrats. What they really want is to contribute meaningfully to the World of Work. But all they are offered is Temporary Jobs and Meaningless Courses. In this regard Sweden is more like France than England…but without the riots.