William Shepherd

In the essay entitled The Foundations of Structural Sociology I suggest visualising the Societal Inversion process as the buckling of a sheet of metal. There are various ways this can occur. One way is to apply a force at the point of major curvature in the centre of the metal sheet.

Imagine this force as the weight of the accumulated debt and wealth divisions in a society as usury turns the screw...year in and year out. The act of Wiping Clean the Slate removes the force allowing society to re-establish The Natural Order. Look at the diagram in my blog on Friday 5th May 2006. Monetary dispatronage is one of the symptoms of the inverted state. A modified form of Gresham's Law might state that in an inverted society bad lending drives out good lending. Perhaps we should call this Wegerif's Law.

Establishment Economics contains its fair share of absolute nonsense. High on this list is the aptly named gross national product. Let me quote from the chapter entitled Democracy and Ecology in The Rise of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997). My understanding of the inner workings of the financial mechanism has altered somewhat over the past fifteen years. Below there are what I now see to be errors. My understanding of the National Debt has changed for instance. But the broad sweep is sound.

'What then of our Gross National Product? Green scholars have asked this question too, but soon found that there is a prior question as to just what it is anyway. Why are we rich if GNP is big and poor when it is small? Why are we successful and making progress when GNP is growing but unsuccessful and falling back when it is decaying?

Progress means increasing some good things and decreasing the bad things and doing it at a sensible pace so as not to put too great a stress on things and disrupt too many things too much before we have a chance to figure out what is going on. How does GNP measure this? Well the sad truth is that it doesn't. In a peculiarly perverse way, it adds together as if they were plusses all the plusses and all the minuses.

Cars are wrecked, bodies are smashed, new cars are bought to replace the smashed ones, hospitals work flat out to mend the human wreckage. The GNP just keeps on piling up. What sort of nonsense number is this?

Unfortunately a very critical one. At least for the megamachine and its Onwarding and Upwarding. With a basic theoretical error in the counting house and usury not accounted for, the whole financial pack of cards collapses without the numbers increasing exponentially. So what you might ask. Then let it and begin a new set of books. What is the problem? When society is in The Natural State there is no problem. But when all power flows from The Financial Mechanism and all goods and services are called into being by the pull of money and credit; when all money and credit is issued at interest as debt; and when debt has accumulated to such a degree that it pervades every facet of society, then to place a fire bomb under the counting house is to nuke society. The Bolsheviks did it seventy years ago and nobody who lived through it would ever suggest doing it again.

The Inverted Order presents a unique set of economic problems distinct from the economic problems and opportunities of The Natural Order. Negative interest rates could do the trick, unwinding after years of winding up. There is something to be said too for Keynes's inflation of the currency. And Lincoln's greenbacks might also have a part to play. But until economic scholars face up to the problem and set about the task of draining debt out of our societies, letting it be and putting a match to the books is unlikely to present the Greens (or anybody else) with a sensible course of action. And this fact is no help to the Greens as they try to put together a manifesto and go to the people with sound economic policies.'

But Wegerif's Law might give us a chance. The ratio of lending for 'goods' and 'bads' could be a good surrogate for a society's production and consumption of goods and bads. It might give us a tracker index that we can use to measure a society's deterioration from a Cathedral Culture serving ordinary people to a Money Culture where the society and its money distribution channels are controlled by the rich and powerful...and their institutionalised major and minor usury generators. There are 125 central banks at the last count. This was written two years ago. I added this coda.

‘The Americans only need to stay in Iraq long enough to get the Central Bank up and running. Once that is on automatic pilot the coalition forces can extricate themselves. How long does it take to embed a central banking system? Three years perhaps? Then Our Boys will be back home by the end of 2006.’ Events of the past two weeks could be no more than feints for the American mid-term elections which look set for a Democratic landslide as they regain control of the House of Representatives. Only a third of the seats in the US Senate seats are up for re-election so the Republicans might just hold on to power there. But whatever happens the Coalition is pulling out of Iraq.

Two years ago I added one final remark at the end of my Clean Slate chapter in England’s Economic Politics for a New Century. ‘Michael Hudson,’ I wrote, ‘will throw the Southern Baptists and the Friends of Greater Israel into some confusion. The Jewish Nation has always been rather ambivalent about its Jubilee Tradition.’

The earliest recorded debt cancellation was in Mesopotamia in 2400 BC when an amargi was decreed in Lagash. Amargi is often translated by vague words like liberty but means an Economic Clean Slate. There were ten other clean slates in Mesopotamia up to the start of the Babylonian dynasty and another sixteen in Babylonia from 1880 to 1636 BC. King Hammurapi proclaimed four in forty two years. The Hammurapi Code is a key event in economic history and its most binding edicts were misharum...'clean slate' debt, tax and bondage cancellations.

There were also regular edicts for debt cancellations in Assyria and Anatolia. And the custom was adopted by popular reformers until well into the first millennium BC, for example in Corinth and other Greek cities from 650 to 580. Greek reformers were called tyrants by their opponents...their tyranny being to overthrow the landed aristocracies, redistribute the property and cancel debts.

The refusal to lift the Cross of Gold off the back of humanity has now spread right round the world. From Jerusalem, through Rome and Constantinople, to Venice and Florence, Genoa, Amsterdam and Antwerp, London, New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, Quebec, Moscow, Delhi, Buenos Ayres, Johannesburg, Sydney and Stockholm.

Debt is growing exponentially and is now digitised in a world wide web of electronic accounts controlled by 1000 commercial banks and 125 central banks. On top of the pyramid sit the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements and the World Trade Organisation. A washing away of the debt records as the clean slate was called in Anatolia three thousand years ago would mean deleting all financial obligations.

Boudewijn Wegerif was a devout Christian and in his view there is no other way forward for humanity than through a Clean Slate Policy at individual and collective levels. Usury must be brought to an end and all debts entered into for profit must be cancelled. We must finish what Jesus began and end money lending at interest and exploitative merchandising that is now basic to our society.

A correct translation of the original Lord's Prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors'. Jesus' assault on his local synagogue and the Temple are best understood against this background. It is not Christians but radical economists who understand the significance of this episode in endorsing the Clean Slate Doctrine adopted by statesmen like Solon of Athens and Julius Caesar of Rome (almost). The ambivalent attitude of the Jews to debt cancellation in the history of their Jubilee clean slate tradition runs through the Jewish Old Testament. For Jesus...the central figure in Christianity...it was central to his ministry.

Jesus stormed into the Temple in Jerusalem, upturned the benches of the Moneychangers and emptied their moneybags on the floor. He also overturned the tables of the merchants selling sacrificial animals. The Christian Gospels also report Jesus announcing in the words of the Jewish Old Testament prophet Jeremiah (7:11) 'My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves'.

Jeremiah’s central message…like that of other Jewish prophets…is that to prey on the weak, to monopolise the land and wealth is theft. Many centuries later Proudhon was to say succinctly Property is Theft. But Jeremiah also stressed the unique nature of the Jewish Covenant which is a subtle mixture of the solidarity politics that are an article of faith to the left and the individual 'human action' approach beloved by the right. Jesus the Messiah was not required to put the world back in order by organising a clean slate like a Bronze Age ruler. This was the task of each and every Jew.

In Boudewijn's words: 'The whole Jewish Nation, everyone, suffers from the sin of usury and the related ills of land and labour exploitation. Jesus was not singling out the Moneychangers and Merchants as damned. They were after all doing legitimate business. He was serving notice on the whole nation and indeed the whole world that if usury is practised and if the spirit of regular debt cancellation and freedom from land bondage is not upheld the earth breaks down. It is made desolate simply because a sustainable economic order is made impossible by the theft.'

The capacity of my hard disk is nine and a half gigabytes and nine are in use. I am tempted to buy an external hard drive…or add one of the spares acquired from dismantling computers that have died on me. But the real problem is that I have so many back-up files and so much recovered data on my hard drive that half the capacity may turn out to be surplus to my requirements. Two weekends ago frustration set me to work addressing the problem.

Then last week my 100Mb website started playing up. It refused to accept the 2.25Mb Adobe pdf file of England’s Climate and Energy Politics due for e-publication on Guy Fawkes Day. I had exceeded my 100 Mb. So I removed some folders from the host computer, paid £10 for another 10Mb of space and tried again. Still no joy so I got irritated because a few months ago I had complained that my Control Panel was wrong. It told me it was full when there was only 50Mb of files there. Eventually someone in authority at Head Basement threw a switch and my stuff started getting through…but the Control Panel was still reading full. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Shrug! Whatever!

I am now spending £2.80 on my Senior Railcard to visit Mahavi’s in Hastings whenever I have Webwork to do. Jamal Mahavi knows his stuff, his Cute FTP programme is a joy and his systems never crash. The £10 I pay for six internet hours is money well-spent. To cut a long story short on Friday I decide to pay Mahavi’s Webhosts thirty pounds for a year’s worth of more data storage and data transfer than I could ever dream of. My arrangement with IX Web Hosting in Kentucky means no more Webworries for a year…a pretty good deal. But home and dry I am not.

Last weekend I wasted an hour discovering that I have no copies of the thirty-six Rye Maritime Heritage images either on my computer or in back-up discs elsewhere onboard. They must be in the Jempson’s Storeroom on Winchelsea Road. Two weekends ago I wasted a couple more hours searching for the manuscript of Loves of My Life…Part III of Aspects of Autobiography. By the end I was almost convinced that the several versions of the three-page manuscript on my hard drive was it. But only almost. I knew that the 24 original hand-written pages are in a recent journal but I could have sworn I had typed them up. There is unrecovered data on my Apple Mac Mini.

This weekend I found a 150-page and 100 000 word draft entitled England’s Economic Politics for a new century by William Shepherd. It is dated Thursday 26th May 2005 and on the cover page it says ‘published on Midsummer Day 2005. Second Draft - 30th May 2005. Edited to Page 20 of Draft II - Page 16 of Draft I. On my hard drive I also found a 66-page manuscript dated 7th October entitled Wiping The Slate Clean with the same three parts…Theory, Reality and Strategy. In both cases the chapter headings for the first part were: Orthodoxy & Heresy, Political Economy, Money Talks, Kings, Land, War Business, Debt Laundering and Clean Slate Doctrine. What to do?

I fear things may get worse before they get better. Beside me on the port bunk is a 132-page Guy Fawkes Day 2004 version in hard-copy entitled English Economic Politics for a New Century which I have scribbled all over in classic Buckminster Fuller manner. There is a hand-written note on the cover page dated 8/1-2005...my daughter’s 32nd birthday…which goes like this: ‘My Apple Mac exploded on Wednesday 13/10-2004 leaving me without the means to continue with this manuscript until I had obtained money to replace my laptop...and £100 to recover data from my two exploding computers.’ Perhaps I need a few Personal Assistants to sort all this out for me. I had a whole menagerie at my beck and call in 1993 when working with Connie on The Tales of Crocodile Uppsala.

My reason for seeking the English Economic Politics manuscript was to introduce Clean Slate Doctrine into this week’s blogging record. Let me take up the story of this particular chapter in the early summer of 2001. Michael Hudson's had been busy researching Babylonian economic history at Harvard University's Peabody Museum when he wrote his history of debt cancellations. The Henry George School of Social Science in New York printed a few dozen copies and stapled them together as a 124-page booklet entitled The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations. One of these eventually landed on Boudewijn Wegerif's desk and it is here that our story really begins. Boudewijn spent a couple of days summarising the booklet and then sent his summary to his e-mail list. It was so it came to pass.

Six months ago Goldman Sachs splashed out $ 2600000000…a very big number…to acquire 5.7 percent of China’s largest bank: the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Last week they made a nice little turn on the deal when ICBC floated on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges and was priced by the new punters…whoever they were…at $139000000000…another very big number. Out with your abacus. These are just numbers.

Forget the noughts for the moment and multiply this second very big number by 57. Set it to the left three positions to take account of the fact that we really want to find out what 5.7% of the very big number is. The 26 in Goldman Sachs VBN#1 has now magically transmuted into 79 in GSVBN#2…an increase of 53. This is alchemy of the highest order.

Tack the eight zeros back on and divide by the 1.8975 Barclays Bank adopted when converting last week’s $400 cheque from Chattanooga into money my local butcher could do business with and you are just seven million shy of two thousand eight hundred million pounds. This would buy me a posh Pied-à-Terre or two in Kensington or Belgravia…with Russian oligarchs for neighbours. May I have this seven million please? I need to store my stuff.

As for the rest of the £2800 million let us hazard a guess where it has gone. Some went to a few hundred Goldman Sachs partners last week in six, seven and eight figure bonuses. Some was recycled back into the banking system where it destroyed large dollops of the money supply…as economists quaintly refer to it. Did you know banks create money every time they make a deposit to your account and destroy money every time your loan repayment comes in?

Some more of the loot went to assorted Money Power Fraternities around the world. None of this funny money ever sees the light of day. Instead it takes a strange turn or two around a gaggle of printed circuit boards clipped onto motherboards surrounded by steel cabinets in the basements of tall buildings in Kentucky or London’s Docklands…to name the particular locations of ixwebhosting.com and easily.co.uk whose Linux Servers and Apache Open Source Software look after my own imaginary numbers. This looting is wrong…but legal. We the People permit banks to reclaim the costs of their expensive lunches in elegant City Watering Holes. Then there is usury…major and minor.

So much for the visible tip of the iceberg. What lies below the water line? Let’s start chipping away. The ICBC float is a peculiar chapter in Free Market History. Not so long ago ICBC was one of the ugliest kids on the global banking block because it was overloaded with Bad Debts…rather like the holding companies for Nuclear Power Plants. Along with China’s other three giant state-owned banks, Industrial & Commercial was technically insolvent.

So in 1999 the Chinese Government started shifting non-performing loans…a euphemism for loans that will never be repaid…off the balance sheets of the Big Four into a state-controlled Asset Management Company. Over the next seven years ICBC’s books were scrubbed clean as one third of its Loan Portfolio…140 billion dollars-worth…was taken out of ICBC’s public purse and placed with AMC. By 2006 ICBC was ready for market…as the saying goes.

One question this raises is whether anything has changed at ICBC. Will local Communist Party Bureaucrats carry on issuing orders to ICBC Bank Managers…money for this; none for that; roll this loan over; swap that with this. Another question is the fate of the AMC. In this country it would be placed in liquidation. For years companies have been able to destroy their debts in this manner while partnerships and individuals have been forced to make good their indebtedness…even after all being robbed of their assets…though not their livelihood…at least in theory.

An interesting coda to this Tale of Everyday Capitalism brings us back to those doyens of the American Financial Establishment…Goldman Sachs. A few years ago the firm moved aggressively into the International Debt Swapping Business which works like this. Peter Late owes Paul Early £2000. Paul reckons there is not a chance in hell of getting his money back as Peter is being screwed by the VAT Gestapo for money he didn’t know he owed and doesn’t have. But Ronnie and his brother have ways of making offers that people find hard to refuse. So they do a deal with Paul…Peter was not asked his opinion…and give Paul £1000 for the £2000 Peter owes him. It is all nice and legal. Ronnie’s solicitor Johnnie Walker draws up the contract, Ronnie and Paul sign it and Paul buys Ronnie lunch.

Happy Paul goes off to Corfu with Tracy. Sadly for the Fray Brothers Paul and Tracy die of carbon monoxide poisoning…faulty boiler...before Peter is informed about the second part of his deal. Paul should have got in the habit of reading the small print. Strange the ways of fate. In the end Peter Late flew out to Istanbul and back to Amsterdam with Ronnie’s consignment of diamonds in Paul’s stead. Peter travels a lot for the Frays nowadays. Peter’s marriage was already crumbling because of his VAT problem but it might have survived. But no love was lost between Kimberley and Ronnie Fray. ‘Diamonds? You are so stupid! You’re a mule. Get out while you can.’ These were Kim’s last words to Peter as she left the flat with her suitcases. Peter would like to wipe the slate clean. But he can’t.

Buying and Selling Loan Portfolios has become a lucrative business for Goldman Sachs. Perhaps I underestimated them. They may turn out to have a use for Rob Muller’s goldmansex.com website. After all what is pornography?

Douglas Hamilton is skipper of the 38-foot ketch Nefertiti and is back in Rye for the winter of o-six after spending the winter of o-five and the spring of o-six in the small town of Santiago on the Galatian Coast of Portugal. I was in Stockholm on Douglas’s return to Rye in July. And when I came back in August he had gone away again for a month to do some work for a German property developer and boating friend in Palma on the Island of Majorca.

So it was a nice surprise when Douglas banged on the cabin roof mid-morning and requested permission to come aboard. The last time we spoke was at his Farewell Party a year ago just before I headed off for Llangolman. There used to be rules about the best time to do things nautical. By these standards he had left his departure rather late. But seasoned mariners are not sure it makes much difference anymore. Nowadays you can hit bad weather any time.

On setting off from Rye the winds were in the wrong direction which meant burning diesel all the way down the channel. Nefertiti carries 60 gallons…enough to last Vemara 120 hours. But Douglas does not believe in moorings or marinas when he can anchor. Nor does he burn fuel if he can help it...and particularly not expensive French diesel.

So Nefertiti hugged the English coast as far as the Scillies sailing as much as possible while keeping within striking distance of the Devon and Cornwall coasts and the low-taxed supplies of English Red Diesel used by boats and tractors. Nefertiti’s crew left at the Scillies…and a few hours later the wind came round and set fine for Spain. At least the direction was fine. Connie would not have ventured out of St Mary’s Bay with Vemara with winds of Beaufort 8 - 9 forecast. But Douglas was running late…and is not one to waste a good wind…however boisterous.

Nefertiti made landfall near Corunna on the north-west corner of the Spanish Peninsular seventy hours after leaving the Scilly Isles. That is seriously fast. ‘My GPS was showing 12 knots at one time. And I was going seven on just my two masts without any sail up.’ Spilling wind is what sailing boats do at sea. Too much more often than too little.

For ordinary mortals a 38-foot ketch is at the limit of what can be sailed single-handed. There is a lot of kit to keep your eye on. One of the halyards snagged on the cross-trees and broke them. This is not critical but cross-trees are there for a reason. They spread the load on the mast. This allows you to carry more sail…or to put it another way makes it less likely that your mast will break should you get caught unawares by some strong winds with too much sail up. It was an exciting crossing. Nefertiti took rather longer to get back.

Leaving Oporto…200-miles north of Lisbon…the wind took her out into the North Atlantic. Douglas took her 300-miles west of Ireland before going about and heading for his landfall at The Lizard. It took 15 days to get back to Rye…long enough to know how English Mariners must have felt over the centuries as they passed The Lizard and started Up-Channel with Brest over the horizon 100-miles away and the coast of Cornwall in sight to port.

Douglas belongs to that dying breed who left school at sixteen and signed on for a seven-year apprenticeship. In a typical winter he can get by on £ 3000. He saves this over the summer plying his Shipwright’s Trade. But he is a big man and at 58 he cannot fold himself into small spaces the way he used to. So he listened attentively as I waxed lyrical on the joys of reaching sixty…with its winter fuel allowances, senior citizen railcards and benefit entitlements on offer without signing on at the Labour Exchange every two weeks. But not without filling in a few forms.

Douglas is wary of governments and their Creeping Totalitarianism. He also hates forms and has spent his life keeping them at a safe distance. But he needs a new suite of sails next year and £ 3000 of Working Tax Credit would cover much of the cost. So I am guessing that the Citizens Advice Bureau will have another client on Tuesday when they are next in town. As for the forms. ‘Bring them to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll do them for you.’ Not so silly having the best shipwright on the South Coast owing you a favour or two when there is work to be done on your boat.

At present the national fame of our Antient Towne of Rye rests on the cavorting of its celebrity inhabitants. Not content to be hosting Sir Paul McCartney’s Divorce Battle we now find that a posh Tory MP has fallen for his even posher Interior Designer. We wish the two gentlemen every happiness…but our sympathies must go to the poor wife. It cannot be easy to be left for another man. Still it makes us wonder if it is the ozone…or something in the waters.

It was not always thus. In 1724 Daniel Defoe included Rye in his Travel Writings. In those days the Chatham Road was the most trafficked in the kingdom. A cursory glance at the map will explain. In the Age of Sail ships might be holed up in The Downes for weeks awaiting a shift in wind. So it was no accident that John Fletcher…the inventor of the Fore-and-Aft rig that allows a vessel to sail against the wind…hailed from these parts.

To appear in Defoe’s travel writings did not mean he actually set foot in the town. Defoe was incapable of writing about a place without giving the impression that he was in the thick of it watching events unfold with his own eyes. Ever the newspaper man.

Jo Kirkham is a Rye Councillor and a former Mayor. She is also one of the founding members of Ryesingers. At Wednesday’s rehearsal we had our first run-through of a Benjamin Britten carol to be performed at our Christmas Carol Concert in the neighbouring parish of Guldeford. Before we got going Jo slipped me her promised 40-page booklet about Rye’s Huguenot Past. French Historians are in town this weekend to meet with English Scholars. You may never get to read this sentence as I hope to be allowed to replace it with a Hyperlink to the 20 000-word booklet.

Most of England’s New Immigrants pass through Dover Docks or Heathrow Airport. But until a hundred years ago Rye was an Immigrant Port Town…boatloads of refugees were welcomed into the town. In April 1682 for instance the Vicar of St Mary’s William Williams and a Jurat Lewis Gillart arranged written testimony that a recent group of newcomers were ‘sober, harmless, innocent people such as serve God constantly and uniformly according to the usage and custome of the Church of England’.

The Rye Poverty Fund of 1804 began as the Royal Bounty in 1681. Jo Kirkham writes: ‘When the funds came to Rye the Lords Commissioners oversaw the distribution, the English Committee scrutinised it and the French Committee allotted it to individuals. Not such a silly way to do things.

After the Restoration of King Charles II and the subsequent fall of Clarendon in 1667 England was ruled by a five-man council made up of Thomas Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Anthony Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale. This is the origin of the word Cabal. My History Boys and History Girls would be instructed to choose one of these gentlemen and give a one-hour presentation to the lower forms three weeks later. Real History is fun.

For the first few days these new History Scholars would play computer games or go shopping. But then unease would set in…followed by panic. They would work their mobile phones until slowly but surely they would find themselves weaned off shopping and gaming…and into Googling. A review session would be advisable after ten days.

In the second week arrangements might be made for our Young Researchers to follow up the leads they turned up on Google by spending a day or two at the university libraries in Cambridge. There is a poverty of imagination among Teaching Professionals that equates Incarceration and Childminding with Education. When will they ever learn?

As a teacher or a parent I would expect to help these scholars with their presentations. How strange is the obsession with Marks and Grades that would call such sensible behaviour ‘cheating’! We want our Young Researchers to learn how to learn not how to take exams. Self-esteem is valuable…and fragile. A failure in front of your peers is to be avoided. As confidence grows assistance may be withdrawn…or converted to a safety net that is there if requested.

In May 1670 Charles’ Cabal negotiated a Secret Treaty with King Louis XIV of France to raise an army and re-equip the Royal Navy. England was part of The Triple Alliance with Sweden and the Netherlands. And the purpose of rearmament was to destroy the Dutch Republic and declare for The Pope.

You are there before me. After successfully completing Level One these History Boys and Girls of ours would be sent out into the World of Scholarship and told not to come back until they had found out the Who? Whom? of these conspiracies. Real History is fascinating.

My childhood world was a 200-yard stretch of London Suburban Streetscape built in 1938. There were twenty buildings on each side of the street divided vertically down the middle…each half a different colour…making eighty English Semi-Detached houses. The Halifax Building Society has calculated that 700 000 of England’s 18 million houses sit empty…up from 300 000 six months ago. The Lancashire town of Burnley comes top of the Halifax list with one house in sixteen empty. There are twenty-one areas where at least one house in thirty is empty. If Crookston Road in Eltham were an average street, three of the houses would be empty. I suspect the true figure is much higher.

A couple of years ago I was asked to estimate the number of empty houses in Rye. I reckoned that in the town centre one in three were empty much of the time. Twenty years ago I lived on Martha’s Vineyard for six months. The island’s permanent population was 5 000 but doubled from mid-April to mid-October. During the summer vacation from June to August it rose to 50 000…peaking at weekends to 100 000 or more as day trippers from Boston and New York poured off the ferries. I was guessing that Rye shows something of the Martha’s Vineyard pattern.

Counting empty houses is rather like estimating civilian casualties in a war-zone. Active enquiry can often produces figures that are ten to twenty times those emerging from passive surveys. I wonder how the John Hopkins Statisticians…who came up with estimates of 650 000 civilian deaths in Iraq…would tackle the job of estimating the number of empty dwellings in Rye? The definition of ‘empty’ is critical…as is the method used to gather the data.

After Christmas this question will no longer be academic. In July the Labour Government gave Local Councils the right to apply to an independent tribunal for an Empty Dwelling Management Order (EDMO) on houses standing vacant for six months. It is a form of Compulsory Purchase Order permitting Local Council to grab empty houses and rent them out for seven years before returning them to the owner…if one can be found. These are presented as joint ventures between Local Councils and House Owners. The Council spends what is needed to renovate the place, chooses suitable tenants and collects the rent they hand out to them. In principle owners get a half share of the profits.

Government Ministers justify their six figure salaries and lavish pensions by meddling. One of New Labour’s flagship policies for Constitutional Meddling fell at the first hurdle when the North East rejected a Regional Council by a margin of 5 to 1. ‘Just another cabal of politicians with their fingers in the till’ was the view. New Labour regrouped and dispatched David Milliband and Ruth Kelly to remove the remnants of local autonomy. Next week Whitehall issues a White Paper to rewrite the rules about Local Bylaws. More Regional Administration from Brussels with Whitehall’s connivance…and without Westminster’s approval…dressed up as Sham Subsidiarity.

Rye Conservation Society is the most successful conservation society in the country on its own terms…which are to freeze the town’s development into a 200-year old time warp by glorifying Heritage and Nostalgia to the benefit of a few commercial interests in the town. But the Rye Conservation Society will have no power to challenge EDMOs.

Yet these new-fangled New Labour devices represent an opportunity for Rye to take control of its housing stock. The trick is to set up a Local Licensing System before Empty Dwelling Orders start rolling out of Bexhill Town Hall. The Home Owner Class which is responsible for empty residential properties in Rye are unlikely to approve of the Social Engineering that Rother District Council will foist upon them with these EDMOs. This is how Rye should go about it.

A House Owner can fight off an EDMO by having a specific plan for the use of the empty property. Rye Town Council should help by giving each councillor a list of streets where they must work with local residents to identify empty houses…in effect creating a new Rye Domesday Book. At the same time Rye Town Council should invite adjacent Parish Councils to join Rye in drawing up a common Bylaw for Empty Dwelling Usage Permits (EDUPs).

EDUPs should be valid for different periods depending on proposed usage and the scheme made self-financing and non-profit by charging Permit Fees. Rye Council should maintain a Town A-List of Tenants. Recent Norwegian experience suggests that House Owners prefer Local Tenants to District Councils as Joint Venture Partners.

In the good old days when I was a boy I would watch Children’s Television at five thirty on school day afternoons. My parents had finally bowed to popular neighbourhood pressure in 1956 and bought a television. It was many years before my parents watched it. They got it to keep the children at home. It had not taken us long to discover who our real friends were…and they always seemed to have a television.

In my memory it was always dark outside when I was glued to the television. On light summer evenings we would be out in the street playing cricket against the lamppost while Mum was in the kitchen preparing baked beans or roes on toast for tea. It was several years before I realised that we were eating fish and not roses. Each time a ball went astray and rattled the kitchen window there would be a cry from inside: ‘Why don’t you boys go up the park to play?’

This was a rhetorical question. Mum actually preferred to have us on hand. When we disappeared to Oxleas Woods or Eltham Park someone had to be sent to the park to tell us tea was ready…these were in the days before mobile phones. But we preferred the sideway or the road. It took ten minutes to get to our play places in the park and in ten minutes you lost a lot of playing time. It was also more fun to be out in the road and dodging the cars.

Crookston Road was two roads away from the Rochester Way which was the main car route from Kent and the South-East London suburbs to the other side of the River Thames by way of the Blackwall Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry or up to Central London through Blackheath, Lewisham, Deptford, New Cross, Peckham and Camberwell to the Vauxhall or Westminster bridges.

By the mid-fifties at five on working days our road was something of a rat-run. Cars coming from Woolwich would turn off the Well Hall Road at the Welcome Inn and then turn up our road to cut out the long wait at the Westmount Road traffic lights at the junction with the Rochester Way. Drivers had their own SatNavs in those days…Local Knowledge. Nowadays the word rat-run conjures up a rather different picture.

For small boys in the 1950s, normal traffic was the milk-cart in the morning, the rag ‘n bone man on Mondays…both horse-drawn…the coalman in his lorry in the morning and the baker’s van in the afternoon. But between five and six in the evening we could reckon on some serious excitement with a car every few minutes. One game we liked to play was called buzz. It was variations on 'It'…'Tag' to Americans. Instead of tagging someone you hit them with a tennis ball. It didn’t take me long to find it more of a challenge to miss…accidentally on purpose…and hit a car instead.

My father came home at quarter to six for dinner at six. By then Mum wanted the boys out of the way so she would have our tea ready by quarter past five. By five thirty we would be finished and ready to ‘ask if we could get down from the table and put the television on’. It would be close some nights. To miss the start of Hop-along Cassidy, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, Ivanhoe…with Roger Moore…or Robin Hood at five thirty was not easy to take.

Another Children’s Television Programme was Mick and Montmorency with a Tommy Cooper-style giant of a man and the vertically-challenged Charlie Drake whose catchphrase was ‘Hello my Darlings!’ He went on to have his own Comedy Show before being pushed off the screen by Tony Hancock, Harry Worth…with Nicholas Parsons…and The Army Game in the 1960s. One particular Charlie Drake sketch that had the whole family in stitches was The Triangle Player. I was reminded of the sketch at rehearsals for The Pirates of Penzance in Winchelsea Hall yesterday.

The rest of the cast have had all summer to learn their parts but this was my first proper run through as Samuel, the Pirate King’s Lieutenant. Apart from re-learning the chorus parts I sang with Ryesingers in February 2004 there are two short solo verses and some dialogue in the opening scene, a short solo piece at the end of the first act and several quartets and sextets.

I did an hour with Elspeth at her piano last Thursday so was up to speed with note-bashing. But my biggest worry was the scattering of one-liners like ‘We’d better pause, or danger may befall; Their father is a Major General.’ where I am the cheer leader who brings everybody in. Miss my cue, come in on the wrong note or at the wrong speed and chaos rather than mere danger will befall. So now I know how it feels to be a Triangle Player.

Nine hundred and forty years ago King Harold II of England made a long march from London to York. He got there in about a week. Napoleon took a little longer to get back from Moscow…and was almost the only one who made it.

But the record for taking an army for a walk probably goes to Mao Zedong. In 1934 his defeated Communist Army was on the road for two years…and six thousand miles…before regrouping in Yanan and going onto the offensive against the Kuomintang Nationalist Army in 1936. By 1949 they had won and set up China’s Communist State.

The English Ruling Classes were too preoccupied with their own little World War and impending imperial implosion to pay much attention…and History Teaching in English schools reflects this Global Provincialism. But here is a picture of Chinese singers dressed up as Red Army soldiers performing during a ceremony last week at Changsu in Hunan Province to mark the 70th anniversary of Mao’s Long March. What would Mao make of China today?

David Walker spent the summer of 2001 pouring over Treasury files, Monetary Committee transcripts and Central Bank annual reports. Three weeks before Lower Manhattan’s Twin Towers were reduced to rubble he posted an article on the Metropole Café website entitled The Gentle Art of Conspiracy. He had a curious tale to tell.

On 11th August 2001 he had been visiting with folks at Norges Bank…Norway’s Central Bank…where he discovered that Norway’s entire 33.5 tons of gold bar reserves had been placed at the disposal of the Bank of England for the express purpose of lending them out to others. We should take Eddie George away from his roses long enough to get him to tell us just who exactly these others were…and why they were so anxious to get their hands on Norway’s gold.

Most people realise that the world’s gold bullion no longer crosses the oceans in the holds of Treasure Galleons. Instead they are pushed around beneath the streets of Zurich. Gold is physically moved by JCB around the vault. One day a particular pile of ingots are labelled America…the next day they sit with the heap marked Germany. This makes a lot of sense as it cuts back on the need for marine insurance. But what is curious is the way these transfers of Gold Holdings between Central Banks and other institutions get put through the books.

It was not the movement of the gold bullion that shocked David Walker but the price of the transaction. This proud Viking Nation was handing over its gold to the Bank of England at a 20% loss. It is one thing to be beaten fair and square at Stamford Bridge but Harold Hardrada must be turning in his grave at the way the fortune he accumulated is being squandered.

An accounting sleight of hand by the name of Fair Value is employed. ‘Norges Bank,’ to quote from the bank’s annual report, ‘values gold and securities at fair value. This is in line with changes in Norwegian accounting legislation and accounting practices in other central banks.’ But Note 3 is more explicit.

‘Gold reserves are marked at fair value which is estimated at 20 per cent below market value as gold is traded in an illiquid market.’ It is time for our Westminster Parliament to insist that Gordon Brown is brought to account about his stewardship of England’s Gold Reserves. Our Norwegian friends should be encouraged to do the same in Oslo.

On BBC Radio Four recently I heard the Tory Historian Andrew Roberts explaining how Democracy came from the Greeks, Enlightenment from the French, Roman Law from the Italians, Protestantism from the Germans and Capitalism from the Dutch. The English Genius was to Mix ‘n Match rather cleverly from what others had created to produce the Best of all Possible Governance. What a strange Eurocentric view of the Adventure of Civilisation. China I suppose was too busy inventing gunpowder and making paper to worry about such mundane matters.

I am getting increasingly sceptical about these Big Picture Television Historians and increasingly see them as part of the Public Relations Business and the Political Spin Industry. The state of our History may be much more serious than the state of our Science.

Andrew Roberts went on to say that the English had the good fortune to have had the right revolution at the right time. A lucky turn of the Wheel of Fortune also led us to chop off a king’s head 150 years before anyone else came up with the idea. What complete and utter nonsense this is. But no doubt it goes down well with the ladies before the gentlemen retire for coffee, brandy and cigars…and get down to the real business of the day.

In my Little Cloud Blog I wrote of scurrying around on Ljusterö in the summer pulling plugs out of the wall when the heavens opened. And I went on to compare and contrast a Rye Storm that ‘comes wrapped in a howling gale’ with a Baltic Storm that ‘refuses to budge for an hour while discharging itself at any earthly target that takes its fancy’. ‘How sweet,’ I remarked, ‘to be a cloud…from which a gold string is dangling…floating in the blue.’ Wrong!

On Saturday night a thunder storm sat over Rye Citadel from five in the evening when we started rehearsing in St Mary’s Church and refused to budge until we had finished our concert four and a half hours later. Our final item…You’ll Never Walk Alone from Carousel…had full Sound and Light accompaniment. As we walked through the storm with our heads held high the thunder echoed down the aisle and the lightning shot across the stained glass window at the end of the nave. Our dreams were tossed and blown but we walked on…with hope in our hearts.

In the morning I had been out image gathering with my camera. Here is one from the poop deck at high tide. That is Bloggsie’s former boat Akela in the foreground….nowadays one of Ricky Goodsell’s three-boat fishing fleet. Every summer Connie was drafted in as crew for three days…and loved it…even though it took her three weeks to cough up the paint fumes she inhaled going with paint pot and brush into those parts of the vessel nobody else would reach. For her trouble she got fresh fish twice a week and the money to keep Vemara shipshape for another year.

Mozart formed the first part of the Simply Opera programme…The Magic Flute, Cosi Fan Tutte and The Marriage of Figaro with songs from West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Showboat and Carousal after the interval.

Simply Opera is unusual as it is made up of a dozen or so soloists who provide backing for each other and occasionally get together as a four-part choral ensemble. The effect is quite stunning. On three separate occasions today I was stopped on the High Street and told of hearing how wonderful the concert had been. My solo piece was in Gee Office Krupke.

Yesterday when I woke up with the light at a little after seven I found the deck was sparkling clean after the storm and by 0730 the sun was coming up into a lovely clear blue sky. So I took myself off to Rye Sports Centre for a Swim ‘n Shower and then took the quarter to nine train to Hastings.

I enjoy trips to town. The centre and seafront of Hastings have been improving ever since I arrived in Rye in 1990 and the town now compares favourably with any town on the South Coast. I spent the morning at Mahavi’s catching up on e-mails and popped out once to buy a Radio Cassette Player from Woolworths for £9.99. This is an essential tool for the Journeyman Tenor. Elspeth records my part onto tape, complete with accompaniment and tricky intros, so I can rehearse in the comfort of my own cabin…particularly well suited to The Pirates of Penzance.

It had been a good week so I was ready to treat myself to a movie. Of those on offer at the Odeon the one that appealed was Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. The plot was the classic Hollywood Cinderella one but the acting was superb, the script and direction excellent and the insights into the Fashion Business interesting although the drugs side of the game was air-brushed out. So I enjoyed myself…which was the point of it all.

Afterwards I bumped into Malcolm at the Costa Coffee Shop in Waterman’s. He and Claire were just back from organising a gruelling three-day Accountants’ Conference in Washington DC and Dynamic Events goes from strength to strength.

It is fun remembering that we first met up as Live-Aboards moored alongside on River Brede Moorings. Connie was there because she loved living on a boat and I was there because I loved Connie. But Malcolm and Claire were there because they were down on their uppers.

Claire got caught by the house price bust in the early nineties and came south with her tail between her legs after handing back her keys…and her Negative Equity to her Manchester Apartment…to the Building Society. Malcolm was blown out of the water when the economy took a nose-dive and left him in a similar situation with regard to his insurance business. They have a humility…and a real genuine niceness about themselves and their success that only a ride on Life’s Wheel of Fortune seems able to impart.

The Russian music download site allofmp3.com has fallen foul of America’s Monstrous Regiment of White Collar Enforcers who are using it as an excuse for withholding endorsement of Russia’s efforts to join the World Trade Organisation. Theft of intellectual rights is the American claim. Poppycock! It is their Low Price Download Strategy that is upsetting the American Music Industry. I opened an account with allofmp3.com after discovering they could supply Little Cloud by the Incredible String Band for a dollar when nobody else had the track…see my 11th July blog.

Policing the internet is a growth business for the Enforcement Industry. On a cross-channel ferry three years ago I chatted with a teacher from Essex in the brief moments between the shepherding of her young flock around the upper deck. It was a fleeting encounter…part way between a chat and a flirt. ‘You were in there!’ was the predictable male chauvinistic reaction of my Fellow Smuggler. ‘Naa,’ was my response, ‘actresses, nurses and teachers are bad news.’

I should have left it at that but added with typical male bravado, ‘…but…yeah…maybe I should follow up. I can get her details from Google.’ Such is the boredom of a Dover-Calais Crossing that this remark evoked a challenge and a ten pound bet. We had a few drinks at The Ship on my winnings a few days later. I cheated a little by asking one of the kids the name of his school before disembarking. But with that information in my top pocket the rest was clear sailing. My Fellow Smuggler has a picture of the fair damsel on his hard-drive…courtesy of her school’s website.

Google has improved by leaps and bounds over the past three years. So it came as no surprise to discover that ethical dilemmas are starting to surface. Recently a friend googled the name of his daughter’s new boyfriend and discovered a daily internet blog expressing his intimate feelings about her and his relationship. My friend’s ethical compass went into a spin so he turned to me as his Blog Therapist. What should he do? It felt like snooping. But the young man must realise his blog could be read by colleagues and friends…and not just some anonymous global audience. Was he wrong to read it? If he read it should he let his prospective son-in-law know? What was he to say to his daughter?

Policies are Good Things. One decision and then Peter Drucker-style Management by Exception…with Common Sense overruling General Policy in Particular Circumstances. Those mentioned in my blogs are given three choices: like it or lump it, choose a pseudonym, or negotiate. Administering the policy is the hardest part. Heidi and Nicholas have said OK…but I wish they would use the Blog Search Engine from time to time...and Magdalena and Françoise are pseudonyms. So far this year two Wickham Assessments have been made. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth Bennett agreed to remain silent. But I exposed…though I am always open to negotiation. However this begs the question of what happens when negotiations break down. The law after all is an ass.

Mumsnet is a lifeline for 60 000 mothers looking for advice on everything from how to deal with a miscarriage to childcare and going back to work. But a furious battle has been raging ever since lawyers for the childcare guru Gina Ford demanded that Justine Roberts…who runs the website…should ‘disassociate from the comments; delete derogatory ones; ensure they were not accessible through search engines; implement a procedure to monitor posts and pay Ms Ford damages and legal costs’. Ouch! What to do?

The debates on the Mumsnet Discussion Forum are healthy. The Queen of Routine’s strict style of child rearing as advocated in her top-selling Contented Little Baby Book needs to be challenged. But while Mumsnet’s Anonymity Policy allowed frank discussions on embarrassing issues between the likes of anorak and gothicmamma, it also permits personal attacks. Justine can hardly take on the well-funded Ms Ford but is naturally reluctant to meekly submit to the demands of Ms. Ford’s lawyers. ‘We don’t deny there are occasions where it gets personal...jokes no one would like to be the butt of…but we have an Abuse Policy and remove comments that contravene it when they are pointed out to us. But with ten thousand postings a day we need our members to be self-policing.’

Recently Goldman Sachs took time out from fleecing the universe and screwing the planet to command the US National Arbitration Forum to give them the internet domain name of an adult entertainment website. It might have given the Supreme Court an opportunity to widen the definition of pornography to include Trading in Derivatives and Fixing the Gold Price. But the Big Beast won at the first hurdle and Goldmansex.com was snatched away from its owner Rob Muller. Muller promptly responded to his grievous loss by registering his ownership of the Goldmensex.com domain name. But this time he took the precaution of informing the media that his new venture was not a pornography site. Goldman Sachs have launched new proceedings. Any takers for Goldmansax.com?

The Home Secretary John Reid has warned parents to be vigilant and look for signs that their children may be about to commit atrocities because they have been recruited into the army. ‘Once recruited these young men may end up travelling to the Middle East where they will be egged on by fellow squaddies to torture and beat Iraqi prisoners to death,’ warned the Home Secretary. John Reid said that warning signs are a sudden change to a crew-cut haircut or an unfamiliar Khaki uniform in the laundry basket. John Reid is a former member of a foreign Communist Party.

This is the derivatives situation on the day the Twin Towers were blown up five years ago…courtesy of Adam Hamilton’s 7th September 2001 analysis of figures reported to the US Office of the Comptroller of Currency. You can update the numbers from the OCC website but may assume that any changes over the past five years have made matters worse. See that red line on the right? This tracks the rise of OCC reported derivatives. See that pie chart on the left? Add Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to the list and you have a pretty good picture of the Rogue Traders.

Financial illiteracy is normal. But to be mistaught is worse than to be untaught. All financial and monetary experts are mistaught. The number of exceptions can be counted on the fingers of two hands. It was always thus. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And theirs may severely damage your financial health. Electoral reality is the note Bill Clinton pinned up on his White House office wall…it’s the economy stupid!

English politicians are learning to interpret this admonition by way of three easy-to-remember rules of thumb. If you manage the economy badly voters hate you. If you claim to be a tax-cutting party and then raise taxes they mistrust you. If you send mortgages through the roof they will swear never to vote for you again. The Cameron-Osborne mantra from the New Tories on economic stability is code for low mortgage rates. Gordon Brown is widely mistrusted now people have become aware of his Stealth Tax approach to increasing the tax burden.

Economically England has become two nations divided by Homes that are no longer the Englishman’s Castle. Homeowners and Tenants are two distinct economic tribes. Tenants pay their rent with money received from the private purse…wages and pensions…or from the public purse…benefits and pensions. The Rent Trail follows its own food chain…to very rich people at the top. Housing Benefit puts a roof over poor people’s heads…a Good Thing as it gets them off the streets…but channels rents into the bank accounts of the rich…a Bad Thing because banks hand out most of the money in circulation; and access and cost of credit depend upon the size of a bank balance. The rich get richer and the poor have no money.

In a cleft stick between the wealth-accumulating rich and the money-less poor are the Middle Classes. For political calculation Home Ownership is a good proxy for the Middle Class. The upper class and the very rich may own their homes but are numerically swamped by the Middle Class. Moreover as election turn-out declines towards United States 50% levels from the high 80% of the post-war generation so the propensity to vote becomes an increasingly important part of the political calculation and getting out the right voters wins elections…if they vote for you.

Home Ownership wreaks havoc with Middle Class Attitudes. Never a Borrower or a Lender Be only works by discriminating between debts…a Bad Thing…and mortgages…a Good Thing. Equity Release runs a coach and horses through this distinction. A Good Day’s Pay for A Good Day’s Work works with a Just Price regime where an Honest Living can be distinguished from Unearned…or unfairly earned…Income. The Entitlement Culture of a Benefit Regime…and some Pension Policies…make a mockery of this idea. Less talked about in the tabloids is the ethical clash between an entitlement philosophy and rocketing house prices. Homeowner mortgage debt declines and unearned income is doled out via the banking system while no equivalent benefit is available to the English Tenancy.

Only dimly sensed by most Middle Class Families is the fact that they are the biggest gamblers since the Peasant Farmer. Their whole life is one never-ending bet on Property Prices and Interest Rates. The happiness of their family is mortgaged to forces over which they have no control. Only inheritance…and inflation…improve the odds. To the Home Owner Tribe, mortgage rates matter as much as income tax. But these change quickly and unexpectedly and are paid from disposable income…unlike income tax and national insurance…which makes them more painful.

England may seem a special case with high levels of home ownership. But liens and mortgages play havoc with Real Legal Title. The English Homes Fiasco is indicative of a poverty of political imagination. The Gladstone-Disraeli Generation would have gone for radical root and branch reform. Five Acres and a Cow; A Home for Seven Hundred Days Work. These are the slogans they would bring to the Public Political Domain to unite the two English Nations.

As only a hundred million people in the world speak Persian it is perhaps a little surprising to find that Persian is the Number Four blogging language in the world. In China four hundred million are actively using or learning the Number One blogging language English...though not for blogging. English is compulsory for the 150 million children in China’s primary schools. So my instincts are right in wanting to take the Magpie Sagas to China.

The Beijing International Book Fair should be my first port of call…with a stop-off in Seoul on the way as the magpie is the national bird of South Korea. Any Business Plan will need to reflect Chinese Business reality where half the books sold in China are Pirate Editions…with seventy rogue editions for every official one. I should be so lucky.

A strange incident in the smoke and mirrors world of Iraq Operations took place a few months ago when two British undercover soldiers wearing Arab dress were cornered in a car laden with explosives. The British Army went in with all guns blazing and got them out. What were they up to? One theory is that they were blowing up the Hajjis to set Sunnis against Shias.

Supposedly this would create the chaos the Neoconservatives needed to go ahead with their plan to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans. Based on this sort of black ops and false flags reasoning this means that the escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the success…not the failure…of US policy.

This gained some credence this week when the Bush Family’s Chief Operating Officer James Baker III followed up the media offensive of the British General Sir Richard Dannatt and his Government Minders with his own report on Iraq Coalition Forces’ Exit Strategy Options. The Coalition could Stay The Course meaning more of the same. This was rejected…as was the Cut & Run strategy which would lead to loss of face and involve heavy casualties.

James Baker’s other options were Redeploy & Contain…doublespeak for minimising US casualties and withdrawing Coalition Troops to bases outside Iraq; Stability First…giving up on democracy, stabilising Baghdad, finding a political solution to The Insurgency by enlisting the help of Syria and Iran; and…well, well, well…Partition defined as splitting the country into a Shia South, a Sunni Centre and a Kurdish North. Oh dear. Ever heard of Kurdistan?

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was founded by Abdullah Ocalan in 1974 and in 1984 began fighting for a separate Kurdish homeland in areas straddling Turkey’s borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria. After Ocalan’s capture in 1999 the PKK continued their struggle politically. From 1999 to 2004 a ceasefire was in place. Partitioning Iraq is first and foremost a Persian and a Turkish problem and only secondly an EU Enlargement and Global Oil problem. Syria’s and Israel’s legitimate security concerns, NATO’s borders and US commercial interests are way down the list.

The best argument for Big Empires…like the European Union or the pre-1918 Austro-Hungarian Empire…is their potential ability to dissolve border disputes. The counter-argument is that they exchange little frontier disputes for big ones. Diplomatic Theorists like Leopold Kohr…and Montesquieu in the 18th Century…squared the circle by paying meticulous attention to the small print. In their tool bag were two principles: Cantonisation and Relative Power.

Cantonisation means dividing above and below any potentially unstable aggregations…defined by the Relative Power Principle. The potential flashpoint for the Swiss Confederation is the top-heavy German linguistic presence. This is dissolved by the Relative Autonomy of the Cantons. Your Nation is your Canton…not your Germanity.

It is often believed that Leopold Kohr was an advocate of smallness for its own sake because he wrote much about scale and pace in human affairs. But in The Breakdown of Nations Kohr’s crucial measure is Relative Size as a surrogate for Relative Power. He is an old-style English Balance of Power man…a Montesquieu man.

Ivan Illich drew attention to Kohr’s love of the German word ‘gewiss’ that translates into English as ‘right’ or ‘certain’…as in ‘a certain size’ or ‘the right pace’. Kohr knew his Classics. He thought in terms of Good, Beauty and Truth. Man as the measure of all things…to use Aristotle’s phrasing. Ivan Illich labelled Kohr’s intellectual domain Social Morphology. Other things being equal, structure determines behaviour. By the end of the 21st Century our diplomats will once again be schooled in the ancient arts of Structural Sociology. Herein lies Peace & Permanence.

One of my very few disappointments about the cancellation of last month’s Radical Consultation is not getting to meet up with Tracy Worcester again. Tracy was happy to be on Zac Goldsmith’s Any Real Questions Panel with Dele Oguntimoju and Angela Bates but felt somewhat overwhelmed when John Papworth…at my prompting…persuaded her to deliver the Keynote at the Opening Plenary.

Privately I was expecting her to pull out which would have been a shame as she would have done so for the worst feminine reasons…doubting her own power as an advocate. I saw enough in 2001 to realise she has that rare gift of passionate engagement that can change hearts.

There was a DVD from Tracy in yesterday’s post. I put it on when I got back to the boat at 9.30 pm after my Ryesingers rehearsal for G & S’s Princess Ida. Three were three samples of Her Work as a Film Director with the BBC. Pig Poland was a Michael Moore style exposé of pig farming in Poland…with Erin Brockovich overtones. The Politics of Happiness was about the pressure on Bhutan to join the WTO and Is Small Still Beautiful chronicled the struggles of forest people in India to secure land rights. All three are hopeless causes. Polish Farming will be taken over by agribusiness; the WTO will destroy Bhutan and the rip-off of India’s rural poor will gather pace. What to do?

In my blog on 16th July I remarked that my translation of Lena Rainer’s book For Sweden Carl XVI Gustav - In Keeping With The Times published for the 50th birthday of the King of Sweden on 30th April 1996 was enough to put me in the Monarchists Camp if another English Civil War breaks out.

Sydsvenskan the publishers included the Bernodotte Family Tree on the inside covers. They had an A3 landscape space to play with…so had room for lots of royal relatives. The problem was that it was in Swedish and I had to translate it into English. Somewhat foolishly with hindsight I assumed I could just pick up the phone and get the Palace to fax me the Swedish-English Court Glossary.

Getting through to the Royal Palace was no problem…Sweden being Sweden. In fact they would have put me through to Carl Gustav himself. The trouble was that until I created it, no glossary existed. I think I got them right…at least there were no recriminations and my invoice was paid promptly. By the end I knew my Marquis from my Duke. So I know that Tracy as Marchioness of Worcester is towards the top of the English Aristocratic Heap.

In my youthful ignorance I was an instinctive Republican. But the best thing for England…and for the Left…would be a New Constitutional Settlement which places power in a pre-Norman Conquest English Council…and empowers the Privy Council and County Governance. The Lord Lieutenants of the Counties should revert from their ceremonial roles and become Chief Operating Officers with direct control of regiments, budgets, courts and taxes. A replay of the English Civil War is probably the least harmful way to reverse Social Inversion and return to a Cathedral Culture.

Charles III needs to carry on where Charles I left off if he is to hand over a Real Kingdom to William V…or Harold III if our Crown Prince gets killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. A bloodless coup would be best. But if this is to come about in my lifetime…by the Twenty Thirties…the political work needs to start now to prevent any excesses by the Right and to educate the Left on the Democracy of Monarchy. I propose to write the Monarchist scripts.

The King of Buen Consejo begins with Shaw’s Apple Cart and ends with the return of Real Monarchy. The early sketches for the sequel 2034…set 50 years on from George Orwell’s 1984…are set in the Baltic in 2034…après le deluge.

John Seymour’s Retrieved From The Future…set in Suffolk a decade after the oil tankers fail to arrive and London’s population dies of cold…has a similar feel. Like John I am going for the Detective Novel Genre. But where John has his heros piecing together recovered written fragments of the history of the collapse, 2034 has echoes of Ayn Rand’s question in Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?

A young brother and sister get drawn into the sort of adventures Enid Blyton created for her parent-free Famous Five and Secret Seven when they explore the mystery of the strange disappearance of William Shepherd…who will eventually turn out to be their Great Great Grandfather.

Two of the novel’s heroes are to be based on my daughter (born 1973) and son (born 1975) as I choose to remember them from 1981…but projected into a new world 50-60 years hence. As they are drawn deeper and deeper into their quest so the True Story of The Rebellion and the Real History of Societal Inversion…R.H. Tawney’s story in The Acquisitive Society over a millennium and its dramatic reversal within two generations…will be revealed.

Interestingly the first thing I did when starting to sketch out the plot ten years ago was to redraw the Baltic Lake Coastline by raising the water level fifty metres. I wanted to have some sunken civilisations for my young hero to discover. Nicholas John is a Steve Wozniak calibre inventor of genius who has harnessed Fish Mobility Technology for his small mini-sub…in much the same way as my 1950s generation designed go-carts and built crystal radio sets.

But I was aware that Kennedy’s Scientific Adviser Jerome Wiesner believed that Global Warming would be worse than Nuclear Weapons. The jury is still out on both counts so I will probably invent something completely different. I rather like the way Douglas Adams wiped out the human race with dirty telephones after sacking the cleaners.

Boudewijn Wegerif died of cancer a year ago. But the Boudewijn Folder on my hard-drive remains a gold-mine of information from several years of What Matters Newsletters. About six months ago I began sorting my Boudewijn Files into a Boudewijn Dossier for a Five-Years-On fringe meeting at the Radical Consultation on Gold & Derivatives & Nine Eleven. I led with a quote from a US Financial Conspiracies website that went like this.

‘Devvy Kidd says eSpeed provides electronic trading services in derivatives and commodities using TreasuryConnect bought from an Enron subsidiary and licensed on August 1, 2001 to a subsidiary of BNP Paribas…the UN oil-for-food broker. By September 11, 2001 BNP Paribas had a network of 70 global trade centers operating 24/7. Their only real competition was Cantor Fitzgerald and eSpeed in One World Trade Center. By hitting the 89th floor, al-Qaeda’s first-time pilot hijacker of American Airlines Flight 11 managed to miss the Buttonwood Global Custodians’ offices on the 79th floor below while killing all of their Cantor-eSpeed competitors on the 101st floor and above.’

Here are the contents of my Boudewijn Dossier: Good Money; National Economic Stabilization & Recovery Act (NESARA); Norway’s Cheap Gold; 2001 Diary of Dollar & Gold Related Events in Russia; The Derivatives Monster by Adam Hamilton; America’s Missing Gold; Gold & Nine Eleven and Derivatives Electronic Trading…to be posted on the web when I next have good access…my present 5-hours a week is just enough to post blogs and check emails.

One of my worries about Boudewijn was his use of Economic Intelligence Review as a reliable source. Behind EIR is Lyndon LaRouche and his British Royal Family conspiracy theories. Back in my Center for Conspiracy Studies days I had studied LaRouche and his writings. The German economist Friedrich List could do no wrong in LaRouche’s eyes and since China has gone with List’s Theories and ignored the Anglo-Saxons it seems he was on the right track.

But once in the wilder hinterlands of LaRouchian Thought he becomes less convincing. The LaRouche Conspiracy Theories are classics of their genre. Everything connects to everything else. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are behind all the evil in the world while truth and beauty flow from Friedrich Schiller.

Typical of a LaRouche Rant is this on the Goldsmith Dynasty under the headline: Thatcherites Host Leader of Chechnya…in the International Intelligence section of Economic Intelligence Review on 10th April 1998 (Vol 25 No 15). I featured LaRouche’s remarks on the Goldsmiths in Chapter Eight of my unpublished May 1998 draft of The Little Euro Book.

'Between March 9 and 13, the President of the breakaway Russian Republic of Chechnya, Alsam Mashadov, was in London on a visit hosted by friends of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The firm which handled the visit was Robertson & Associates, Thatcher's public relations firm.

The official host was Lord McAlpine of West Green, chairman of the Referendum Movement, created and financed by the late Jimmy Goldsmith. Lord McAlpine was chief fundraiser of the Conservative Party during the Thatcher Years and is a controller of the British-steered Chechen insurgency. Another host was Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Howarth who had been Thatcher's private parliamentary secretary when she was Prime Minister. Howarth has close ties to the British Armaments Industry. Another host was Imran Khan the Pakistani cricketer married to Jimmy Goldsmith's daughter.

During his visit Mashadov had speaking engagements at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute. He also spoke before a group of British Islamic Community Leaders, organized by Imran Khan at the Royal Commonwealth Institute, and toured the British Parliament, Oxford University and the London Stock Exchange.

Mashadov, who doesn't enjoy any official diplomatic status, visited the Imperial War Museum where he was saluted by the officers and men of the Honourable Artillery Company and met the museum's chairman, Field Marshall Lord Bramall, the Lord Lieutenant of London. Last but not least he dined with Margaret Thatcher, whose son is very much involved in oil deals in the Transcaucasus.' Gosh! Wow! ‘n Cripes!

Back in 1980 I drew up two lists from the EIR Hitler Book. LaRouche approved of Plato; Athens; Solon; Socrates; Jesus; St. Augustine; Benjamin Franklin; Hamilton; Carey; Nicloaus of Cusa; Leibnitz; Riemann; Cantor; Klein; The Göttingen School; Stein; Humboldt; Scharhurst; Monge; Carnot; Mozart; Beethoven; Schumann; Schubert; Brahms; The Weimar Classics; The Renaissance; Armin Mohler; Ernst Niekisch; Aksakovs: Niehbuhr; Sorel; Barres; Moeller van den Bricke; Lagarde; Langbetin; Jacques Necker; Canehy; LaPlace; Aud de la Garde and Von Kettler. Not being well-versed in European Cultural History some of these names mean little to me…but others will know them.

Here are his Bad Guys: Sparta; Lycurgus; The Dark Ages; Dionysus; Jesuit Pluralism; Malthus; Tories; Cartesian; East India Company; Robespierre; Danton; Marat; Napoleon; Wolf; Wagner; Rousseau; Hjalmar Schact; IMF; Eastern Establishment; Evola; Pareto; Spengler; Max Weber; Trilateral Commission; Club of Rome; German Greens; Savigny; Hegel; Dostoyevsky; Marilyn Ferguson; Anthroposophy; Nietzsche; Schopenhauer; Lord Carrington; Kissinger; Genscher; Andreotti. Notable by their absence from The Hitler Book were Aristotle; Aquinas; Jefferson; Paine; Kant; Coleridge and Emerson. Aristotle & Aquinas are probably Good Guys…and the others the Baddies.

Queen Elizabeth II is off to the Baltic States today and will spend a day and a half in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn…back in Windsor Castle for the weekend. Estonians have a soft spot for Brits ever since troops and warships helped defend Estonia’s independence against the Red Army after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The others like us as well because we were one of the few EU Members to open our borders to workers from the Baltic States after enlargement of the EU. Lithuanians are Number Two from Eastern Europe working in Great Britain. The Poles fill the top spot.

To mark the Queen’s Visit to the Baltic here are some previously unpublished snatches from Creaky Tales. Several life-times ago in the Spring of 2004 I took myself off to Hersonissos on the Island of Crete for a few weeks and devoted my time to Creative Writing. I returned to Sweden feeling rather pleased with myself with 100 000 words-worth nestling inside my Dell laptop…lots of it Dialogue…and all of it Fiction. It may not be the Baltic States. But it is not that far away. Meet Connie…the real hero of these stories…as she greets her mortal enemy - the Russian.

‘The Russian’s father was a merchant seaman who started his watery career in Odessa. It then came to pass one lonely evening on the Island of Cyprus that he chanced upon a pretty young Greek girl. The details are obscure and the part played by the Soviet authorities onboard his merchant vessel shrouded in mystery. But nonetheless, it was in some such manner that the offspring of this fleeting liaison came to spend his formative years in Nicosia picking the pockets of the British legions garrisoned upon the island.

The first meeting between Connie and the Russian has become something of a legend on Rock Channel. The Homeric version goes something like this. “Hullo,” said Suomi Girl, “I’m Connie. I’m a Finn. I’m told you’re Russian. So take that!” It helps that both Finns and Russians drink to get drunk. On that at least they see eye to eye.

After a night of cheap vodka Connie and Vladimir were the best of mates. But the Russian still rubs his chin nervously whenever Finland is mentioned. And Connie continues to insist that the Russian gives Karelia back. Greek parentage and Cypriot residence cut no ice with our local Finnish ambassador. “Sort it, anyway!”

The Russian was always a little defensive about the Winter War of 1941. The Finns had clearly won but the Russian occasionally tried to claim a draw…‘like the Yanks in Vietnam’. But normally the subject at issue was whether the Finns played fair.

Apparently the Soviet Army had been at a disadvantage for two reasons. Firstly the Finns wore white while the Russians advanced into the snows of the frozen north bearing upon the long-suffering shoulders of their conscripts standard Soviet military-issue khaki. The upshot of this was that the Finns could see the Russians but the Russians could not see the Finns. The respective body counts duly reflected this fact.

Secondly it was the Soviet Army and not the Russian Army. Standard Soviet army policy required that officers and men should be of different ethnic origin. So on the odd occasion a Finnish Freedom Fighter was caught in the cross-hairs of a Soviet rifle, no bullet was fired because the eye behind the sights and the finger on the trigger were connected to a brain that responded to a different language to that of the officer issuing the order to fire.

The Russian was offering odds of three to two on Russia winning next time around. These odds were based on two ‘cast iron facts’. The Russian reasoned that any Viborg Treaty on the international status of Karelia would include a clause requiring both sides to wear khaki in future conflicts.

And the language problem had been solved…not by shooting soldiers with inadequate fluency in Russian…but by the simpler expedient of breaking up the Soviet Union into its constituent parts. “Except Chechnya!” mumbled Connie’s chaperone. The Russian responded in an emotionally charged Georgian dialect: “Da, da! Except Chechnya! Bastards! Mother-fucking Mafiosi!” Connie kicked Chaperone under the table and the subject was promptly dropped to permit fraternal drinking to resume.

Connie had taken the Russian up on his bet because her reasoning was rather different. According to Connie the Finns had gone soft in the head over the past sixty years. Voting to join the European Union was evidence of that. This would have dire consequences because the Finns would abide by the terms of the Viborg Treaty. The Russians on the other hand would cheat. “They would train polar bears to shoot Kalashnikovs at anyone speaking Finnish. They might even teach them to lob hand grenades into Finnish army camps. Microchips in the polar bears’ butts would give them all the geopolitical positioning data they needed for such dastardly deeds. Then there was Nokia.

Nokia had made the Finns too dependent on mobile phones. So on the first day of conflict the Russians would just have to disable the mobile phone masts. Then the Finns…like the Danes in the Hitler War…would roll over without a whimper. Unable to relay messages it would be all over by tea-time. Really quite a civilised way to have a war.

Just a pity about the retributions that would follow. Without a king, the Finns could not dispatch the brave fellow onto the streets wearing the Star of David as the Danes did in 1940 to confound their Nazi conquerors and save the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens. The Russian is presently devising a scheme for betting on body counts.’

From left to centre: Robert Zoellick, former US Trade Representative and Deputy US Secretary, former international advisor at Goldman Sachs, now international Vice-chairman and Chairman of its international advisory arm; Robert Steel, new US Treasury Under-Secretary, previously Goldman Sachs; Robert Rubin, joined Goldman Sachs in 1966, served as co-chairman and co-senior partner with Stephen Friedman 1990-92, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary 1995-99;

From centre to right: Josh Bolten, White House Chief of Staff, former Goldman Sachs executive director of legal and government affairs in London 1994-99; Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary previously Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive; Stephen Friedman, former White House chief economist, previously Goldman Sachs co-chairman 1990-92 and chairman and senior partner 1992-94. Just one big happy family…with their fingers in the till.

In September 1999, in an attempt to bring order to the gold market, the European Central Bank and 14 member central banks signed up to the Washington Agreement which set limits to their gold lending and gold derivatives activities. The price of gold then shot up by $60 to over $325…way beyond what their system could handle.

Edward A. J. George, Governor of the Bank of England and a director of the BIS Bank of International Settlements, described the ensuing panic in a letter to Nicholas J. Morrell, then Chief Executive Officer of Lonmin Plc…a principal shareholder in Ashanti Goldfields Ltd.

‘We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now.’ Robert Rubin is an authority on Lord Keynes’ Gibson Paradox.

Six months prior to this agreement Boudewijn Wegerif had been party to the forming of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA. For the past seven years GATA has been compiling evidence of a Gold Cartel led by the top commercial, investment and bullion banks…Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan, Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

The Gold Justice pages on Boudewijn Wegerif’s What Matters website details this illegal anti-trust conspiracy to keep the price of gold down and the price of the dollar up. It seemed a good idea at the time.

Enron thought so too and spent half a billion dollars buying its way into the London Metal Exchange where it came unstuck…catapulting its Wall Street Worth from plus 80 billion dollars at it's peak to minus $13 billion when it went broke. Enron is rumoured to have sorely stretched the capacity of the Gold Cartel to manage the gold market when it sought to unwind its gold borrowings immediately prior to its corporate collapse. Big Bets means Big Busts.

Goldman Sachs is an investment bank…not a commercial bank…so it is not required to report its derivatives position to the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. This means that unlike JPMorganChase it is hard to know the derivatives exposures at Goldman Sachs. But there are suspicions that it may be of JPMorgan Chase proportions.

Before Cantor Fitzgerald disappeared under the rubble of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 it might have been possible to shrug this off. But there are persistent rumours that Goldman Sachs is in deep, deep trouble because of Derivatives Trading Losses over the past two years as the gold price has broken out.

This quote from Sherman H. Skolnickat on the Indymedia website is typical: ‘Goldman Sachs is reportedly in a sinking boat with Germany's huge financial ship Deutsche Bank and the worldwide bank octopus Bank of America. According to some bond and gold experts the Federal Reserve had to come up with 600 billion dollars to rescue this trio of bust financial players.’

Boudewijn’s position was that the Gold Price Manipulation would work its way through the whole financial system. It was the rotten core that would implode the derivatives market. He once remarked that if there were one thing he had learnt from following the money it was that ‘it leads to gold…and silver…always. At no point in history had mortal humans been psycho-spiritually able to handle the immortal precious metals non-idolatrously.’

He went further in his Notes for a Golden Future with a Silver Lining: ‘Gold is dismissed as just another commodity; no longer needed for exchange. This is folly. After God gold is the key to culture. Take gold out of the economy and you remove its heart. Take the heart out of the economy and culture is destroyed. As if in confirmation of a truth known to all psychologists, the gold that has been denied has been taken up by mean forces to serve greedy ends in a caricature of its first purpose.’ Didn’t John F Kennedy run into trouble relying upon America’s Best & Brightest?

The Astronomer Royal delivered his promised Full Moons on September 7th and October 5th and served up our highest tides of the year…4.3 metres…at midnight three days later. A 4.2 tide comes with the November Moon on Guy Fawkes Day three weeks hence. But we end our Year of Non-Climate Change with a modest 3.7 on Luciadagen.

England’s Climate and Energy Politics by William Shepherd is now ready for digital publication on Guy Fawkes Day 2006. It is 35 000 words, 172-pages and 172x100x12mm in its present cesc publications format. For comparison the size of my 1987 Penguin edition of George Orwell’s Down & Out in Paris & London is 182x112x15mm.

It has been a busy week for indolent Journeyman Tenors. On Tuesday afternoon I was drafted into the Winchelsea Singers’ production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance for 3rd and 4th November as Samuel…the Pirate King’s sidekick. The bad news is that this gives me some lines to learn…singing and speaking…by Tuesday. The good news is I get to grab Kate and take her for my wife…against my will Pappa…against my will. Yeah! Sure!

On Saturday 21/10 Simply Opera will be presenting an evening of music from Mozart to Broadway at St Mary’s Church in Rye which meant rehearsals on Tuesday evening and Sunday afternoon this week. Ryesingers’ February performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida is now in rehearsal on Wednesday evenings. And yesterday Ryesingers treated themselves to a celebration party for their 35th anniversary…complete with After Dinner Cabaret. All this together with Paddy Harvey’s Sixtieth Birthday Celebration today made for a busy social calendar this week.

Everyone enjoyed last night’s party at the Rye Community Centre. There were about sixty of us there. One of our own did the catering. Françoise de Naillat joined me for the evening…motoring back and forth to Rye from her weekend of Glass-making in Rochester to join her Ryesingers friends. I spent ten pounds during the week getting kitted out at Rye Charity Shops…and then led the newly-formed Rye Barber Shop Quartet in their first ever stage performance.

Our Barber Shop Quartet came on towards the end of Ryesingers’ sixty minute programme which included a very witty rendering of Cinderella in monosyllables…the story is not complicated. It had everyone in stitches of laughter. Nobody knew the script-writer…but John Cleese, Ronnie Barker or Tony Hancock’s scriptwriters Galton & Simpson would have been pleased to claim the credit. Pam Peters…who plays Ruth the Pirate Maid of all Work in The Pirates of Penzance…also brought the house down with her Joyce Grenvillesque monologue.

The Ryesingers’ Cabaret was thrown together in three weeks. I had long harboured Barber Shop ambitions and an hour Googling turned up a one-minute MP3 snippet on the Cambridge Chord Company website of an arrangement of The Teddy Bear’s Picnic by their Musical Director Paul Davies.

A short flurry of e-mails and I had the sheet music in my hands…acquired in exchange for my promise to contribute to Chord Company funds. Drafting in Elspeth on piano was the next step…an unaccompanied stage appearance would have been reckless. But the big hurdle was getting the recruits to their first rehearsal…and commitment. Singers are invariably overcommitted.

It is hard to know how well you do in these situations. My ambition went no further than getting the four of us up on stage at the appointed hour. We followed the Teddy Bears with Gee Officer Krupke from West Side Story…a preview from the Simply Opera programme…and left the stage before the applause died away. But by eleven o’clock the audience were well enough inebriated to have clapped anything by David Peart, Andrew Hewitt and Ian Perry.

Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously so the evening must be rated a great success. Upon reflection it is hard to banish the Grumpy Old Man thought that this was the way things were in the Good Old Days when I was a boy…well a generation earlier than that…when there were no radios, televisions or MP3 Players and people made their own entertainment.

Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales gives some of the flavour of these old ways. We have lost more than we realise…notwithstanding the warnings from the likes of J.B.Priestley…in Lost Empires for instance. Perhaps these Good Old Days will return in my lifetime…hopefully by choice and not necessity.

French Imperialism has not had a very good press over the past century. Their losses in the 1914-1918 Kaiser War makes the 2003-2007 Iraq conflict seem nothing more than a skirmish. After that their decision to avoid the Hitler War was understandable.

Besides their five-year insurgency from 1940 to 1945…the French Resistance…was crucial to the Allied Victory. Our 20th Century imperial wars were not quite as world-wide as modern historians pretend. The English Monied Classes may have had their Trading World at stake. But they lost it to the Americans anyway.

On balance I am a Chamberlain man. Run away. Live to fight another day. It was not really a European war either as Spain, Sweden and Ireland kept their troops in barracks for the duration.

Peace was nearly chosen in 1941 after the debacle of Dunkerque. Ironically in view of the subsequent Bush-Blair Axis of Evil in Iraq it was the Labour Party members of Churchill’s Coalition Cabinet who backed him to carry on fighting. The Conservatives were for Peace.

But the French have their past glories…and will doubtless have their future ones. Losing the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games shows Great Statesmanship. One of these Old Glories was the Battle of Yena where they routed the Prussians. Today they were busy re-enacting the Grand Occasion with a mock battle. They won again.

On this day 940 years ago (minus the lost eleven days of 1741)…and you thought losing an hour each spring was a problem…the French were in action again. Today the Battle of Hastings was re-enacted a few miles along the coast from us here in Rye. The French won and toppled the best Royal Dynasty we ever had…King Cnut of England and Denmark. We took revenge in 1944 when Our Hordes of Noble Hooligans stormed the beaches of Normandy.

One of the few pieces of history every child in this country knows is the death of King Harold II in 1066. Unfortunately the only bit they know is probably wrong. The evidence of the arrow in the eye comes from the Bayeaux Tapestry where the wording ‘here Harold is killed’ extends above a soldier with an arrow in his eye and a man falling from a sword wound to his leg. Such a terrible wound would more likely kill a man outright through shock or by piercing into the brain. But we know Harold continued to fight until he was decapitated.

Chelsea Football Club play at Stamford Bridge…named after the place of King Harold’s victory over his brother Tostig who had invaded under the banner of the King of Norway Harold Hardrada. Many battles in history hang in the balance until some slight shift in fortune favours the victorious combatant. The Battle of Hastings appears to fall into this category. Harold was so close to victory that William must be regarded as extremely lucky.

But William’s biggest slice of luck was the absence of English Cavalry in Hastings. Harold almost certainly used cavalry at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and rode them on his march north. Infantry could not have maintained that pace and fought immediately upon arrival. The widespread historians’ declaration that the Saxons only fought on foot is nonsense.

Warhorses were bred and highly valued…as many wills of the time attest. Harold’s shield wall knew how to take off a horse’s head with one axe blow. Ann Hyland in The Medieval Warhorse has come up with the most likely explanation. King Harold’s incredible forced march north and back again had taken its toll on the horses. Those that had survived the battlefield in Yorkshire were probably lame or exhausted. Harold had to do without them.

After 1066 most references to King Harold were obliterated or ignored. His title in the Domesday Book reverts to Earl Harold. Harold’s mother Gytha fled to Flanders; his brother Wulfnoth remained in captivity in Normandy for over thirty years…he was never to return to England. Harold’s sons by Edyth Swannhaels tried to raise a rebellion but were repulsed and fled abroad. William was either too feared or had settled himself too tightly to be dislodged.

One of Harold’s four sons…Edmund or Magnus…died during a raid probably on Bristol. Ulf, the youngest, was imprisoned by William. Harold’s daughter Gunnhild remained at Wilton Nunnery. But Algytha…the second of his three daughters…travelled to Smolensk…perhaps with her surviving brothers…to marry the Russian prince Vladimir who in effect became the first Tsar of Russia. Their first-born son was known in the Danish world as Harold.

Algytha died on 7 May 1107. Her great-grandson was King Vlademar I of Denmark from whom the present royal houses of Denmark and England claim descent. Our future King William V of the House of Windsor will be carrying the blood of the Great King Harold II in his veins…as well as that of William of Normandy.

We the English can choose which strain gets our allegiance. That is the Good News about Monarchy. The Bad News is Pretenders…great hoards of them. I have heard it said with authority that a goodly number of us are descended from King Henry VIII.

Before the French get too cocky about 1066 and All That it is as well to point out that although William of Normandy had himself crowned king and while most of the male English aristocracy were replaced by Normans, the ordinary English…the Saxons…remained English. England was ruled by Normans but never became Norman…which is somewhat of a pity as French might have been my mother tongue…which would have improved my French accent.

Once upon a time there was much talk about the need for Joined Up Government. One department’s policies should not contradict another’s. But the real problem of governance is the absence of Joined Up Political Philosophy. It is this Disconnect that makes Joining the Policy Dots impossible.

One example is the illegal Iraq War and its flagrant breaches of Geneva Convention protocols in its slaughter of non-combatants. If we were talking about smoking killing two and a half percent of the population over four years we might expect urgent action to put the Tobacco Companies out of business. We might also expect the media to hound the directors onto their front pages and off to the Courtroom for prosecution, convictions and sentencing.

There is also the appalling Intelligence Advice. Where is the New-Broom needed to sweep clean every corner of Britain’s Stupidity Services in the Middle East? What...if anything...has happened to the restructuring of Intelligence Outsourcing Strategies relied upon in the region over the past 60-years?

But the immediate remedy is hardly Rocket Science. It worked for the Americans in Vietnam. It can work for Britain in Iraq. Declare Victory and Go Home! Whether home is England, Germany or Afghanistan is unimportant.

Violent Death is the Number One Public Health Priority in Iraq. And the Botched Invasion and Flawed Military & Diplomatic Strategies are the principal cause. For God’s sake run away from Mesopotamia now! Israel must make the best of it.

Another example is the Foot and Mouth Disaster five years ago. Politicians suppress and distort the truth. They are Economical with the Actualité. This is not always a Bad Thing…and their intentions are not always bad. Lesser of Two Evils Paradox are no strangers to the Jesuit Seminaries who have doctrines to deal with them. But when scientists become strangers to the truth we are in trouble.

Not one Government Senior Adviser has yet admitted publicly that the mass slaughter of farm animals in the 2001 was unnecessary and based on False Statistics, Faulty Computer Modelling and the Flagrant Abuse of generally accepted norms employed for centuries in the use of Scientific Methods for analysis, evaluation and deduction from experimental observation. In a word - Bad Science.

The mistakes that were made have been laid bare in a devastating paper compiled by Paul Kitching and published by the World Organisation for Animal Health. Of the ten million animals slaughtered a third were perfectly healthy. Out of ten thousand farms where sheep were killed only 1 300 were infected with the disease. The Foot & Mouth Disease Virus was not spread through airborne infection. The epidemic reached its peak before culling began. The Three-Kilometre Killing Zones were not justified. And the estimates of infected premises was always pure guesswork.

The language used in the Kitching Report has a controlled anger about it. He talks of a culling policy driven by unvalidated predictive models and of ‘public disgust with the magnitude of the slaughter’. His conclusions have much broader application. He writes that the UK experience provides a salutary warning of how computer models and the statistics used to predict the course of an epidemic can be abused in the interests of scientific opportunism.

Those models used by the British Government were badly flawed because they relied on computers rather than advice from vets and virologists who understood the nature of the disease. ‘No model will produce the right output when fed the wrong input,’ says the report. The Government was late reacting to the outbreak and fatally moved decision-making away from FMD Experts to the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (Cobra). The result was ‘carnage by computer’ as one farmer put it. And a slaughter that was ‘grossly excessive’. And we trust these jokers with Our Climate?

There are vital lessons in the report about how to control future outbreaks to avoid the horrendous cost and slaughter of 2001. There are also broader lessons about managing scientific claims and computer forecasts when these are producing Mayhem & Idiocy. Unfortunately no heads have rolled and there is no sign of any lessons being learnt.

African leaders meeting at the United Nations have hailed as historic an agreement to extend the mandate for slaughter in the Darfur region until the end of the year. ‘The 7 000 African Union troops will continue looking the other way until the year or until every last refugee has been slaughtered whichever comes first,’ commented the UN.

No sooner had the party conference season come to an end and the new parliamentary session was underway at Westminster than they were up to their old trick of burying bad news and banishing uncomfortable facts to the Media Margins. Their useful…and doubtless unwitting…idiot was a soldier by the name of General Sir Richard Dannatt.

Sarah Sands had the Chief of the General Staff remarking that if Our Boys carried on getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan for long enough there would be no army left for him to lead. All his soldiers would be dead. His impeccable Sandhurst logic therefore dictated that the British Army leave Iraq…some time soon. Shock and Horror!

Meanwhile buried with their bad news is a significant part of Iraq’s civilian population…one in forty to be precise. Nuclear Devices in Oxford and Cambridge would do much the same job to this country…with less suffering.

The same team from Johns Hopkins University who discovered 100 000 Iraqi deaths in 2004 while the Pentagon was talking hundreds have now found it is actually much worse. Not 100 000 but 650 000 additional Iraqi civilian deaths.

Working with Iraqi doctors and visiting over 1 800 homes in Iraq the John Hopkins team identified more than 12 000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members. They were stunned by the picture that emerged from their investigations.

Now we have a better understanding of the true toll from the invasion and how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is the occupation and the continued army presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from the British presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting it is making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion the mortality rates due to violence have increased.

The total figure of 650 000 is truly staggering. It represents 2.5% of the Iraqi population. Two years ago there was much huffing and puffing…and official denial…when The Lancet reported 100 000 additional Iraqi deaths since the invasion in March 2003. Government ministers were successfully deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings.

But their denials are now coming back to haunt them. Washington panicked and sent Bush out to cry ‘Bullshit!’ At least Whitehall kept its nerve…for the moment. To them Civilian Casualties are just another Spin Factor. Figures from Darfur and the Congo based on the same methodology are met with frowns as heads are nodded. ‘The situation is grave and intolerable. The International Community must act’ say the diplomats. But when it comes to Iraq the story is different. At least this time no attempt is being made to discredit The Lancet report. Instead it is being buried.

Also Richard Horton the editor of The Lancet is getting smarter. To ensure the latest results are not kicked into the long grass he penned an article for The Guardian. ‘Passive surveillance’ he explained ‘will always underestimate the total number of casualties.

We know this from past wars and conflict zones where estimates have been low by factors of 10 or 20. Only when you go out and knock on the doors of families…actively looking for deaths…do you get close to the right number. This method is tried and tested. It is the basis for mortality estimates in other war zones.’

Horton goes further. ‘Iraq is an unequivocal Humanitarian Emergency. Civilians are being harmed by the British presence in Iraq not helped. Just what are we doing there? And why? We have a legal obligation under the Geneva Convention to protect civilian populations. We are not adhering to it. But progressively subverting it year on year.’

British Imperial Foreign Policy…based on 19th-century notions of the Nation-State…is long past its sell-by date. We need new principles to govern our diplomacy and military strategy. The idea of Human Security and not National Security should be one of them. Another should be the health and wellbeing of Innocent Civilians and not the economic self-interest and territorial ambitions of states and corporations. In short a Human Scale Foreign Policy.

Richard Horton was on the right track when he ended his Guardian article with these words. ‘The best hope we can have from our terrible misadventure in Iraq is that a new political and social movement will grow to overturn this politics of humiliation. We are one human family. Let's act like it.’

Once upon a time the Swedish Temperance League had enough political clout among the aspiring lower classes and angst-ridden middle classes voting for the governing Social Democratic Party that the party were persuaded to demonise Alcohol as the root of all evil and the cause of poverty, adultery and sloth among the Peasant Classes…by then linguistically ennobled as Blue Collar Workers...and proud of it.

Salt and Sugar would have been demonised too had Swedes known then what Science tells us now...were every barn and basement equipped with the apparatus for cash-free production of the substances for personal use from the products available in abundance in the local fields and surrounding countryside.

Local economic competition was always essential to ensuring private commercial interests would be vocal in their support of putting local producers out of business and regulating the market…a euphemism for opening up local trade to outside interests. In the short term this might even benefit local people if local monopolies had grown too fat and could be displaced by foreign merchants. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

But once these adventurers had coalesced into foreign monopolies…and eventually they would see that it was in their shareholders’ interest for them to fix and then hike prices…then local villagers and urban parishioners would be worse off than before.

These are but three examples of substances that would nowadays be on the same proscribed lists of Hazardous Substances as Cannabis, Heroin and Tobacco but for the accident of their early historical appearance in the port towns of the overdeveloped world and the daily needs of local communities.

As a tribe Swedes are nothing if not pragmatic. Collectively they do not knock their heads against a brick wall. Their instincts are always to fight fire with fire. So to prevent the free trading of Estonian cigarettes across the Baltic from Tallinn and beyond they reduced taxes on Swedish cigarettes until the Risk-Reward Ratio for smuggling no longer made sense to either the consumers or the merchant adventurers trying to make an honest living supplying their need. Entrepreneurs are rational creatures and move on when the bottom falls out of a market.

If we are to teach our children well then this is all they need to learn about Commerce when in Infant School…and there is no need to start them before the age of seven. Then when they move up into Junior School at the age of nine they can be taught about Money and how its creation and destruction makes the world go round.

Of course models, games and simulators will be needed and these must accurately represent Central Banking techniques and the fractional banking practices employed by their Commercial Banks. Their creators need to know what they are doing.

But one of the wonders of the Internet is that tools like this only need to be developed once and then every school in the world can use them. This is the sort of 21st century project Bill Gates should be funding in Cambridge instead of privatising failed 20th century organisations like the United Nations. Tom Greco did some work on this in the 1990s before Real Computers were invented…6BC as the new 1994…by creating a Board Game of Money Monopoly.

25 years ago Jay Forrester’s System Dynamics Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management were also heading in the right direction with their National Economic Model…before they listened to Federal Reserve Board Disinformation and got spun off into the weeds. Pity nobody pointed Professors Forrester and Maas in the direction of Human Ecology by Thomas Robertson so they modelled what really takes place instead of what they were told was going on.

On a trip to the UK in 1983 I tried unsuccessfully to get people interested in setting me up with a team to take the MIT model as a departure point for the development of a British National Economic Model based on the System Dynamics approach. But System Dynamics turned out to be too new a field. However it is worth trying again 25 years on now the Real World and Computer Software are up to speed…and I know the right questions to ask the experts.

But back to the Schools Project. We would start the children off at Level One with Church Mints and Exchange Banks in the Middle Ages. Then by Level Three they would be adding Tea Clippers and Spanish Galleons…and finding out why Marine Insurance made good sense. By Level Six they would be managing the Real Bank of Wessex, selling Halal Mortgages and making poverty history…by regulating economic trade in and out of their bailiwicks.

Once the cleverer students reach Level Nine they can begin creating and integrating financial systems for different public purposes. What better way to introduce them to the Societal Inversion that has transformed a Cathedral Culture producing Livingry into a Money Culture hell-bent on ever-increasing delivery of Killingry?

A decade hence England would have an informed electorate able to assess proposals from the political parties...Bankers to join the Institute of Chartered Accountants from the Right; Get a rope and hang the bastards from the Left; Pensioning off the Looters or running them out of town from the Centre ground.

How nice to get shot of the current nonsense about supply and demand and market forces as some sort of Deus ex Machina and Law of Nature.

Shepherd on Climate is now set up in draft form as a cesc publication in Adobe pdf format. It begins with the 9000-word Tavern Talk on Climate (50 pages) and ends with the 3000-word Energy Wars (16 pages).

Between Tavern Talk and Energy Wars are the 32 web-postings on the Shepherd on Climate website arranged into two volumes…the 8000-words More Talk on Climate (38 pages) and the 12000-word Carry On Talking (52 pages).

At 32000-words Shepherd on Climate (156 pages) is four times the size of the 7000-word Politics of the English Pound (36 pages) published in 2003 and eight times the size of the 20-page England’s Landed Property set up in draft form in 2001 with the 40-page Landed Thoughts section as a one-page list of contents.

Climate is also 44% longer than the 22000-word (100 page) Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997) published in 1989.

My daughter had her first taste of the publishing business at the tender age of sixteen when she had the task of seeing the Swedish Green Party book through typesetting…as it was called then…and book-making. She remembers her business trip to Glastonbury from Stockholm to pick up the books…they were not ready of course…as a nightmare and her performance as Editor and Project Supervisor as a failure. But she did much better than she realises.

The Sink or Swim approach is rather brutal. But it sorts the sheep out from the goats and can be the quickest way to learn. The Apprenticeship System is gentler but who is willing to stick at their trade for seven years and then spend the rest of their life practising the crafts they have mastered? Does each Polish Plumber bring a mate with him?

First jobs are invariably nightmares and often perceived as embarrassments at the time and…with hindsight…as failures. Newcomers to the world of work are never prepared for the reality of the world of jobs and tasks, goals and objectives, agendas and procedures.

Confusion is normal in most firms with everyone muddling through and trying to keep up appearances. It can take several years…with much bumping of self-esteem along the way…before the newcomer develops a modus operandi for surviving…and dare I suggest prospering…in the world of work.

Sitting in a classroom and taking written examinations can never prepare anyone for the real world. The world of work is not like school with preset questions and right and wrong…or multiple choice…answers to each question.

There are things that need doing, problems to solve and people around you that need managing. Managing your boss for instance is a crucial skill that comes with practise on several different bosses but few get to be very proficient.

But at least the school playground and the journey to school teach something about the psychology of a workforce and the sociology of a workplace.

Schooling has two principal functions in society. It provides childcare so women can undermine union wages by competing for jobs and adding to unemployment. And it provides supervised incarceration to keep young people from running wild on the streets and irritating the idle old and the idle rich.

The clocks go back in two weeks, there is a nip in the air most mornings and the nights are drawing in with sunrise at quarter past seven and sunset eleven hours later. Seventy-five shopping days to Christmas, PC-Hut has closed down and Vodafone keeps phoning me with offers of credit on my phone bills and an upgrade on my mobile phone if I renew my contract…so I cancelled my Monthly Direct Debit, signed on for Business Online Billing and collected October copies of Vodafone Autumn and Vodafone Business to help me get my head round it all. Life goes on.

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. was born on 9th October 1936. I first met Tom in Zurich shortly before his fiftieth birthday in September 1986. He looked to be in his late thirties at the time. Indeed it was not until a few weeks before 9/11 when we were holidaying together in the English West Country that I discovered his true age. Until then I had assumed anybody looking as trim and fit would be 40 something in the 90s and hit 50 around 2000.

My first memory of becoming intellectually conscious of the shifting nature of Age and Olding during the course of my lifetime was when I started taking myself seriously as a writer. I follow Aristotle’s maxim that ‘to learn how to do anything do it’. But now I became forensic in my approach to the World of Letters.

I had always realized that a novel must have a beginning, an end and a voice (first person or narrator). I am not a Creative Writing Course person…my ambitions are to be self-taught. But having discovered Beginning, End and Voice I then discovered that novelists hide much more than they reveal. A few fleeting episodes is the reader’s lot.

In a New York interview in the 1930s Hilaire Belloc remarked…to the surprise of many of his contempories...that P.G. Wodehouse was the best writer of his generation. Belloc may have had one eye on his American hosts as Wodehouse was very big in the States at the time...famous as a lyricist on Broadway. But such high praise was enough for me. Before starting Creaky Tales I curled up with Wodehouse in general and Psmith in particular.

Writers like Wodehouse…and Dickens…produced much of their early output for the weeklies with several of their best books written as serials. Far from being a problem this regular production under deadline pressures seems to have been a tremendous boon.

Delivering a thousand words a day for my daily weblog this year provides a similar discipline. Once acquired the skill can be applied to other situations. My Pug Due Diligence was rewarded with pages of notes and complete sections copied verbatim by hand into my Writer’s Journal. Wodehouse letters to an old friend and fellow writer are masterpieces about the writer’s craft and profession.

As part of my apprenticeship I also revisited the novelists of my youth like Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, John Buchan and Nevil Shute where I discovered that J.M. Barrie had weaved his magic spell on Tom and myself… not the full Peter Pan of perpetual youth but the trick of slowing down the Olding.

Both of us look like reaching the age of Shute’s retired heroes twenty five years late…in our mid-70s instead of our early-50s. To make our mark upon the world we have the 50-years between 25 and 75 whereas they had the 40 years between 15 and 55.

This new male reality about work and age has practical consequences. I no longer hand my male friends a 60th birthday card but buy them a 40th card and tell them they have a classic choice…Double or Quits. Eighty is the new Four Score Years and Ten…with a healthy ninth decade a Life Bonus. Good if you’re lucky enough to get it.

Four years ago Tom Greco sent me an update of his work priorities for 2003 which were ‘demystifying money, banking and finance by showing how flaws in the existing structures cause so much unnecessary suffering’. His method would be ‘through further research, writing, teaching and speaking; through collaborative activities involving the design and implementation of new exchange mechanisms at the local, regional, and global levels; and by promoting cooperative non-exploitative approaches to finance and economics’.

Like all good guys Tom works from a post-office box under an Ownwork label...Community Information Resource Center in Tucson Arizona.

One of Tom Greco’s projects was a new website called ReinventingMoney.com to provide ‘access to the best ideas and information sources for transcending the limitations and dysfunctions of conventional money and banking structures’.

My contribution to the website will be the digital text of Usury And The Church Of England by the Rev. Henry Swabey promised for Tom’s seventieth birthday and posted to my History of Usury blogsite in readiness for its reinventing money weblink.

Sabey’s thirteen available chapters are: I. Scriptures; II. Early Church; III. Medieval Church; IV. Church of England; V. Church Mints; VI. Just and Stable Price; VII. Pannus Mihi Panis; VIII. Usury Legalized; IX. Final Protest: X. Usury Moralized; XI. 18th Century; XII. After Waterloo; XIII. Recovery.

In 1989 I arranged for the 16-year old daughter of a Swedish colleague to 'edit and supervise' the production of The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1982-1997). One thing this involved was spending a day in the Assembly Rooms on Glastonbury High Street putting together pages on the ‘good enterprises supported by William Shepherd’ which began with the J.B.Priestley quote ‘The merchant did as much as the scholar to bring in the New Age’ and included five pages describing ‘some of William Shepherd’s good companions and their endeavours’.

One page has extracts from my 1986 pamphlet on Ayn Rand’s writings in Atlas Shrugged about Money as the Source of All Virtue. It ends: ‘For news of the North Atlantic Economic Forum, information on the Alternative Economist Grapevine and course readings and advice on the theoretical and practical work underway throughout the world on Money, Debt, Usury and Currency contact Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

It was good advice back in 1989…and it is even better advice in the fall of 2006. Happy Birthday Tom. America is blessed by Americans like you. Have a good one!

One thing that Hedge Funds, Home Owners and Nick Leeson have in common is the Gambling Business. All three are in it. Nick Leeson never wanted to be. He started off in Arbitrage. But the deeper he got…betting on the rise in the Japanese Yen…the fewer his options. After the Kobe Earthquake, Double or Quits was the only chance left.

Few English Home Owners know they are speculating on Property Prices. Even fewer understand they can place their Property Bets without buying a house. The banks and their mortgage mis-sellers are understandably reluctant to enlighten them about Property Funds…gains without gutters…as this would scupper their Equity Release ‘n Asset Grabbing Scam. Never mind! Poor dears! They know not what they do.

These three sets of gamblers have something else in common…location, location, location. Nick Leeson hailed from a Grammar School in Watford…a 30-minute train ride north of London while most of Europe’s Property Speculators come from the South-east of England. It was the London-based Barings Bank that led the charge into Bet Hedging 200 years ago by buying Louisiana from Napoleon on Jefferson’s account. Leeson is in the Barings Tradition.

Eurohedge…the industry’s PR-arm…reckons there are now 1200 Hedge Funds feeding the Market Frenzy…with four out of five of them managed from the UK which means the City of London’s Square Mile or Edinburgh’s Golden Mile. These Hedge Funds have surged ahead in the past two years from $280 billion of assets under mismanagement at the start of 2005 to $325 billion a year later and spilling over the $400 billion mark by the middle of 2006.

According to Eurohedge there is a hundred billion dollars-worth of assets…$ 100 000 000 000…overhanging the World Markets from the Top Ten London Hedge Funds…two thirds controlled by the Big Five of Man Group/AHL ($16 billion); GLG ($15b); Blue Crest ($13b); Breven Howard ($11b) and Lansdowne ($10b). The second tier includes Sloane Robinson, Cheyne, BlueBay, Marshall Wace and the Children’s Investment Fund.

The mighty Goldman Sachs has a $10 billion in-house Hedge Fund…the Global Alpha Fund…running out of New York. The fund was looking just dandy in mid-summer…up 9% and on track for another year with 25% annual returns. But in August this year they lost the plot. By the end of the month the fund was back where it started having lost a year’s gains in one month.

A spokesperson was quoted as saying: ‘Global Alpha expects to record a sharp decline every 20 months.’ Hmm! Global Alpha is one of dozens of hedge funds that follow the macro-strategy that earned George Soros infamy as the man who broke the Bank of England when he bet against the pound.

These enormous aggregations of Private Capital make big picture punts on the World Economy with currencies, equities, bonds and derivatives…and then hide their windfall profits away in Offshore Tax Havens. That at least is the theory. But in practice these are Insider Trading Funds…and they can go horribly wrong when a Dead Cert turns out to be a Set-Up or the horse being backed gets nobbled.

For instance it looks like JPMorganChase have been betting the farm on Gibson’s Paradox that under a fixed gold price regime real interest rates remain predictable. Just before 9/11 a report from Adam Hamilton entitled The Derivatives Monster flagged up the fact that JPMorganChase held title to two-thirds of the Interest Rate Derivatives Market…worth the notional amount of $ 17 700 billion (£17 700 000 000 000) and twenty times the size of the London Hedge Funds. This only made sense if they had inside knowledge of a Gold Price Fixing.

My Andy Capp Strategy has me updating my CV, sending it to the ten biggest London Hedge Funds and threatening to sue them under the new Age Discrimination Legislation…came in force this week…if they refused me a job or some other way to use my talents at a few hundred pounds an hour.

As Hedge Funding will soon be going the way of Tulips and DotComs they would be smart to enlist me. The warning signs are there. Eurohedge reports that institutional investors like pension funds are replacing rich individuals as the main source of new money. That’s a dead giveaway. These funds are high leverage as well as high risk. Bets can be lost as well as won…ask Nick Leeson.

On 11th September 2003 the front-page story in the Daily Telegraph included this eye-witness account from Hanna Sundberg: ‘Anna Lindh lay on the floor and it looked as if a tall man wearing a peaked cap was hitting her. When he ran away he threw away a knife. As blood streamed on to the floor she cried out: ‘God, he has stabbed me in the stomach’. Strangely the official version of events had the murder weapon turning up at a subway station.

The Telegraph linked the attack to the Swedish Euro Referendum three days later. ‘It has echoes of last year’s murder of Pim Fortuyn…the Dutch populist leader…shot dead in the first political assassination in the Netherlands for 400 years and points to a further coarsening of European politics. Mrs Lindh was the one politician with the charisma to save the floundering Yes Campaign. It is eleven points behind in the polls despite the biggest spending campaign in Swedish history and the support of all the big guns of the political establishment.’

But this story was written by journalists. Sweden’s Diplomats and Civil Servants knew better. The Swedish Government were aware that after outspending the Keep Our Swedish Krona Campaign by six to one and still being 50 to 39 behind in the opinion polls the probability of the Yes Campaign losing spectacularly was rapidly becoming a certainty.

Urgent Crisis Planning would have been underway. A sharp reaction from Brussels could be expected…including the rapid deployment of Central and Private Banks to orchestrate a run on the Swedish Krona. A Defence Plan against this run on the currency…and its consequences…would have been Number One Priority.

As Sweden’s Foreign Secretary the diplomatic task would have fallen to Anna Lindh. The first line of defence for the Swedish Currency would be Norway with her oil-backed currency, Denmark with her Euro Opt-Out and Göran Persson’s Third Way colleagues and fellow Opter-Outers…Blair, Brown and their UK New Labour Government.

The Texans and the Neo-Cons in the Court of King George might also have been potential allies. Nothing threatened US Dollar Hegemony more than the rise of the Euro as an alternative Oil Currency. Indeed it would have made sense for the CIA to pour secret funds into the Swedish No to the Euro Campaign.

But here Anna Lindh had a problem. Within the Social Democrat Government she had been arguing for Sweden to join France and Germany in outright opposition to the Iraq War. Her stance on the war was no secret. Lindh referred to Bush as ‘the lone ranger’.

Anna Lindh died on the morning of Thursday 11th September 2003 from complications after her nine-hour operation. The European Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten called Anna Lindh ‘a brave and talented politician’. Brave? Were threats made to her and her family? From whom?

Anna Lindh had thrown herself into the Euro Referendum in the weeks before her murder. As one of the most popular politicians in Sweden she fronted the Pro-Euro Campaign. Her face was on billboards all over Sweden. Following her killing all Euro Campaign Events were cancelled, Television Campaign Commercials withdrawn, Campaign Billboard Advertising removed and Print Media Advertising cancelled. To Swedes Anna Lindh’s assassination was a direct attack on Sweden’s Open Society.

Top politicians learn to be good actors. But no one doubted that Prime Minister Göran Persson’s sense of loss was heart-felt and his tears genuine. Indeed his quiet dignity endeared him to the whole nation. The idea that the Swedish Government or the Social Democratic Party might have played any part in an Assassination Conspiracy is remote.

But the juxtaposition of the assassination of Anna Lindh with the American Neoconservative’s Second Anniversary of 9/11 and the European Union’s certain defeat in the Swedish Euro Referendum remains worrying.

The view of some Conspiracy Theorists is of a psychological miscalculation of massive proportions. The plotters assumed Swedes would be cowered into a Sympathy Vote that would sweep the Yes Campaign to victory. Many Swedes feared this outcome…and the No Campaign started preparing to cry foul. There are precedents for such miscalculations.

In the 1940s the Nazis believed their bombing of English cities would bring the country to its knees but it had the opposite effect. And on Crete, Nazi Reprisals galvanised the Greeks and cost the German Army dear.

Swedes saw a connection between Anna Lindh’s killing and the Euro Referendum. But the nation’s psychological reaction went the opposite way…indeed with hindsight the Yes Campaign may have grounds for demanding a new referendum. Swedes refused to be blackmailed and turned out in force to give a resounding landslide victory to the No Campaign.

My e-mail exchange with Boudewijn on the day of Anna Lindh’s death expresses my own outrage. ‘Jeez...do we live in evil times when hundreds (thousands?) of people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars of salaries sit around at desks in their grey suits and write memos and draw up plans to kill off the good guys...Robert Kennedy...Olof Palme...Petra Kelly...and now Anna Lindh.'

'We should get hold of their kids and talk to them about what Daddy does when he goes to work. They'd be appalled...even if their wives are happy to turn the other way as long as the salary comes in and the mortgage gets paid. Private Eye’s front page cartoon took this tack.

Alistair Campbell is sitting with his son and the boy asks: 'Daddy, What Did You Do In The War?' Daddy Alistair answers: 'I started it, son!'

The Swedish Foreign Secretary Anna Lindh was assassinated on the second anniversary of 9/11 in September 2003 prompting an exchange of e-mails about her murder with Boudewijn Wegerif in the What Matters Programme at Folkhögskola Vardingeby in Sweden.

Dr Aidan Rankin…a regular contributor to the Conservative Party’s Salisbury Review responded to the exchange like this. ‘A strange and disturbing development in Sweden, I agree. I am copying you an email to a Danish friend…Luise Hemmer…earlier today. She was involved in the anti-euro campaign there and comes from a green-left background…Peoples Movement Against the EU’. Here is Aidan’s e-mail to Luise.

‘Your words confirm my thoughts…and suspicions…absolutely. What a strange and sad turn of events. There seems to be an unexpected dark side to Swedish Political Life. It is surely unusual for a peaceful, prosperous and apparently stable nation to have two major political assassinations within two decades. Is this a manifestation of what might be called the Ingmar Bergman side of the national temperament?’ Interesting to have seen Luise’s e-mail.

In the United States…with its Christian Fundamentalism and historical memory of the demonising of Olof Palme’s principled opposition to the Vietnam War in the Nixon Years…many would have been struck with the same thought. So I forwarded Aidan’s e-mail to Tom Greco in Tucson Arizona by way of an afterthought to our earlier exchange on New Labour & The British-American Project. I prefaced it with these remarks.

‘I don't go along with Aidan. There are three bunches of cowboys with assassination as sanctioned policy when their interests are threatened. Always as a last resort...but the need for last resorts seems to be escalating exponentially of late.’ This is how I listed them:

1. NeoCons and their global hegemony agenda…CIA clandestine;
2. Brussels and the British American Project and their Euro-fascist agenda…probably mercenaries;
3. Israel and their survival…Mossad.’

Adding for good measure that ‘Anna Lindh, David Kelly etc. ran foul of one or other somewhere along the line and had to go. Still can't believe that intelligent people can come up with such psychobabble.’

A day after these exchanges I spent a few hours at my desk drafting a number of scenarios for the Anna Lindh Assassination. My Middle East one included a posting from a website providing ‘noteworthy news items related to Europe and its relation to the global currency markets, economic stability and Middle East turmoil.’ I included web references to Anna Lindh’s Human Rights Agenda in the Middle East. Here is my draft summary…dated 13/9-2003.

‘Lindh advocated greater respect for international law and human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, criticising the Ariel Sharon Government and condemning Palestine Suicide Bombings as ‘atrocities’.

In a speech on 30th January 2003 she had called on Israel to ‘end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem’ and on the Palestinians to ‘do everything in their power to stop the terrorist acts and take legal measures against those responsible’ and to ‘produce reform, for security, but also for democracy and human rights’.

Despite this even-handedness the Sharon people regarded Anna Lindh as very pro-Arafat. ‘Prime Minister Sharon was elected for his promise to increase security,’ she had said in a recent speech. ‘Instead the level of confrontation has been raised and the military effort increased as preparedness to enter the area under Palestinian control and attack Syrian targets in Lebanon demonstrated.’

Sharon’s people would have been aware that she was tipped to take over as Sweden's Prime Minister if Göran Persson’s resigned in the wake of a landslide victory for the No to the Euro Campaign in the Swedish Referendum…the outcome the pollsters were predicting for 14th September…’

Because Lindh was publicly critical of Israel, there are those who suspect an Israeli Assassination Squad. Two months ago I remarked that Conspiracy Theorists need to discriminate between the State of Israel, American Jewry, the Jewish Diaspora, Zionists and International Jewish Finance…not least because of the use of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion by the Nazis to whip up Jew Hatred in the 1930s. My analysis concerns itself with the State of Israel.

Jews are over-sensitive to criticism from the Goyim and routinely over-react with accusations of anti-Semitism. But by English Standards this is equally true of the Moslem World…where threats of Fatwas are wielded in much the same way.

Still you have to be pretty paranoid to believe Mossad would assassinate leading politicians on the instructions of the Israeli Cabinet just because they are critical of some aspect of Israeli Government Policy. The people who need to fear Mossad Hit Squads are terrorists and assassins...not European and American Politicians.

Another reason to doubt involvement of state operatives like Mossad is because such agencies have far subtler techniques than frenzied stabbings in department stores. There are internet claims that Mossad was beefed up in January 2003 for global assassinations. But as Israeli Whistleblowers end up in Solitary Confinement for decades only a very foolish person would leak such trivial information.

So unless you are prepared to postulate a very complicated game of bluff and double bluff Anna Lindh’s killing is too low-tech for the Israeli State. Rogue elements are always possible. But these are more likely to come from the other four Jewish players on the global stage.

For future historians the global legacy of George W. Bush’s two term presidency (2000-2008) will be the beginning of the end of the United States after 50-years as top dog. More and more political analysts are coming out openly …both inside and outside America’s borders…with the opinion that Bush and the NeoCons have lost the plot.

The official line in Washington is of course to deny this vigorously…on the record. But off the record the US Foreign Policy Establishment fears that the clear-minded realists might be right. George Dubya Bush has a lot to answer for.

Twenty years hence what will America’s decline mean for the English? In an article Whose Century is the 21st Century? Immanuel Wallerstein predicts that United States will enjoy one last fling…a revival of power…in the absence of any serious military contender, China will displace the United States as the world's superpower and the rest of us will become ‘an arena of anarchic and relatively unpredictable multi-polar disorder’. I don’t think so.

Wallerstein’s Dismal American Future begins with the US Dollar…a basket-case sustained by massive infusions of bond purchases by China and Japan and goodness knows where else. This is too good to last and when the US can no longer barter its Funny Money for wealth produced elsewhere in the world the American Standard of Living will plummet. So what? Send in the Marines! Not that easy.

Iraq has shown that airplanes, ships, and smart bombs are not enough. You need boots on the sand to crush local resistance. The US does not have enough marines and the Bush Presidency has squandered the chance of getting them from patriotic fervour within her borders or from carefully crafted alliances outside. Of course America might try to bomb the rest of the world back into the Stone Age. But it will lose its wars…and the world will draw their own political conclusions. This is already happening.

The UK media has been quiet about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its members are Russia, China and the four Central Asian republics…with invitations extended to India, Pakistan, Mongolia and Iran. The Boston Globe calls this ‘an anti-Bush alliance’ and a ‘tectonic shift in geopolitics’. Right on both counts! All Washington and Tel Aviv can do is huff and puff and try to whip up a United Nations campaign against the Iranians. No chance!

What about Wallerstein’s prediction that China will emerge as number one on the global stage? This seems plausible enough with the Chinese Empire doing well economically, expanding militarily and projecting power far beyond its borders.

But China is not politically stable. The one-party structure has economic success and nationalist sentiment going for it. But it faces the discontent of the half of the population left behind…and the discontent of the other half who want more political freedom. But China also has neighbours to deal with. It wants Taiwan back in the imperial fold and the Koreas unified. And coming to terms with Japan psychologically and politically is fraught with difficulties. Chinese Global Hegemony 20-years hence may be plausible…but it is hardly a dead cert.

However Wallerstein’s dismissal of the rest of us as a motley crew of loose cannons ricocheting about in post-industrialist Brownian Motion is faintly ludicrous. Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland have shown us another way. In the 21st century it is dangerous to threaten others.

The English must shed their inherited imperial pretensions by getting out of the Killingry and Money Laundering businesses and severing connections with International Financial & Lawyer Capitalism…and its global institutions like Central Banking and the IBRD, IMF and WTO.

The English need a Constitutional Makeover that embraces Dual Nationality…inherent in the emerging New World of Diasporas…and dissolves the old British State into an array of Self-Sufficient Principalities. The English need to adopt the governance structures that held sway from the Age of King Alfred to the invasion of William The Conqueror.

Key to the 20-year transition will be the Old English County Governance Structures and a new Magna Carta to be signed in 2015 on the 800th anniversary of Runnymede. A Lord Lieutenant Department in Whitehall with cabinet status is a good way to start. The English Energy Brief will give it power and Charter 2015 will give it kudos.