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.