William Shepherd

My dentist is back from Ramadan. Last week my tooth underwent the final stage of preparation for a silver crowning next week. My dentist has two older brothers and a 10-year old sister. How different must be their world to that of their parents...brought up in Istanbul? Yet Can we ask more than to be born in interesting times? It is a funny old world, n’est-ce pas? And incidentally that is Dewsbury in Yorkshire on the left and Lahore, Pakistan on the right.

This year broke the record for the hottest September. UK temperatures averaged sixty degrees Fahrenheit and broke the previous record from 1949 by one and a half degrees. Ireland also broke its September record…as did Oslo. The other side of the world has been unusually warm too. It is spring in New Zealand which has had the third warmest September on record. And Melbourne logged its warmest September since records began in 1907.

Australia has been unusually dry with drought meaning poor grain harvests and rising bread prices next year. Price hikes may be a Dead Cert but not for this reason. Three quarters of the world’s corn exports come from the US but these are vanishing fast.

In South Dakota Ethanol Distilleries now claim half the corn harvest. And if all the Ethanol Plants proposed for Iowa get built they would use all the corn grown in the state. There is a US Ethanol Subsidy of 51¢ per gallon until 2010 so with oil at $70 per barrel distilling Fuel Alcohol promises huge profits. World grain consumption grew by 20 million tons in 2006…with 14 million tons of it going into the fuel tanks of American cars.

Almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel so the line between Food and Energy Economics is rapidly disappearing. Ten years ago Food Processors and Livestock Producers converted Farm Commodities into products for Supermarket Shelves. Now the Ethanol Distilleries and Biodiesel Refineries are piling into the market for Farm Commodities to supply fuel to service stations.

So the Oil Price is now the support price for Food Commodities. The vast number of distilleries coming on stream is also drawing grain away from beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs production. Another problem is that corn and soybean production in the American Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. It produces massive topsoil erosion and pollutes surface and groundwater with pesticides and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

The world’s crop-based fuel production is concentrated in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Last year the US and Brazil each produced over four billion gallons of ethanol. Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock while the US distillers use grain…mostly corn. The 55 million tons of US corn going into ethanol this year represent 16% of the country’s grain harvest…and supplies 3% of its automotive fuel.

Brazil is converting half of its sugar harvest into Fuel Ethanol…doubling the world sugar price by effectively withdrawing 10% of the harvest. In 2005 the European Union produced 1600 million gallons of biofuels…half of it biodiesel produced from vegetable oil in Germany and France and the other half ethanol from grain in France, Spain and Germany.

Last year China converted two million tons of grain into ethanol mostly corn but also some wheat and rice. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations as well as biodiesel refineries. Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries but has also had the sense to call a pause to assess the future for Palm Oil Supplies.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year. Ominously the world grain stocks are at their lowest level in 34 years with 76 million more mouths to feed each year. As the reality of this trade-off works its way through global markets the poorest 2 000 million people in the world who already spend well over half of any income they have on food will be priced out. Grain importers like Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Mexico will need to find the money to match their grain imports with imports of tanks and guns and riot gear.

A week ago I was sent The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution to review for Fourth World Review. Keith Sutherland the author is an interesting chap…Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and praised by Robert Hazell of the Editorial Advisory Board of Societas as ‘the Hazlitt of our age’. Here is what I wrote.

Keith Sutherland fears that David Beckham and Richard Branson have taken over the governance of England and mentions Max Beloff’s comparison of Tony Blair’s Third Way with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Ten years ago Sutherland was commissioned to edit The Rape of the Constitution and chose to include Tony Benn’s essay ‘How Democratic is Britain?’ In this essay Benn updated Bagehot’s 1867 summary of the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ elements in the English constitution and the power of The Cabinet. ‘Today,’ wrote Benn, ‘the House of Commons is the dignified part…there to excite and preserve the reverence of the population…while the powers of the Crown controlled by the Prime Minister are the efficient part by which government works and rules.’

James Stuart Mill once observed that the country’s constitutional problem was the monopoly exercised by the monarchy and the aristocracy and this caused Macaulay to remark in 1832 that ‘…the House of Commons was more the Council of the Government than the Defender of the People.’ But, as Sutherland comments…and as Kohr explains in his essay The Four Radicalisms…extension of the suffrage by the Victorians though sensible in its day could not empower people because ‘once the political cake has grown past a critical size each voter’s slice becomes so small as to be causally irrelevant.’ Echoes here of an understanding of Papworth’s Ten Laws of Political Dynamics.

By 2001 in Elective Dictatorship: the Unholy Trinity of the British Constitution Sutherland had realised the game was up. Any reverence the population might once have felt for Parliament and Politicians had disappeared under Blair’s abuse. Sutherland’s radical conversion continues in The Party’s Over. Scepticism about Democracy sits deep in our English Political Tradition. It began in Plato’s Republic when Socrates remarks that ‘A system of government that is not based on knowledge and competence and puts power in the hands of rhetoricians is a corrupt and decadent system.’ What are Spin Controllers, Public Relation Firms and Dodgy Dossiers if not rhetoricians and their devices?

Sutherland has taken to heart Michael Oakeshott’s essays on The Masses in Representative Democracy and On the Relation of Philosophy Poetry and Reality. He also makes favourable mention of Montesquieu whose analysis of the key concept of Relative Power was updated by Leopold Kohr in Breakdown of Nations (1955) and of the long-forgotten pamphleteer James Harrington…a contemporary of Hobbes…who was thrown into the Tower of London for sedition. ‘I would like to think,’ writes Sutherland, ‘that this essay is just an updated version of the Aristotle-Harrington vision.’ The metaphor of the political cake began with Harrington.

Sutherland wants to see an aristocracy of wisdom and talent…Lords Advocates…presenting the arguments to a Jury of Commoners…the Oxford Union’s debating format with good men and true instead of a rabble of students. Abolishing political parties would be a necessary reform. As less than one percent of the population are actively engaged in party political activities public subsidy should be removed instead of being wasted on billboard electioneering and television commercials. The genius of the British Constitution,’ writes Sutherland, ‘has been the ability at certain times in history to meld all three estates into one while retaining the independence of all three.’ Elsewhere he remarks that British institutions are rarely abolished but continue in theory…and in ceremonial practice…shorn of their essential functions. ‘Names remain in constant use but they represent different things.’

Here are Sutherland’s final words. The political party is an anachronism and the notion of a democratic mandate is without foundation. The dominant position of the political party should be replaced with a modern system of representation based on the way juries are selected. The British constitution understood ‘efficiently’ is an elected dictatorship and the answer is not to seek to separate powers and functions in the American way but to ‘reinterpret our own constitution more literally.’ Well and good as far as it goes. But in Keith Sutherland’s next book I hope he will go further because the English must resist attempts to impose a European Constitution upon this Sceptered Isle and revisit King John’s Magna Carta of 1215...not the one signed by Henry III in 1225 which omitted many clauses.

Mistakenly Sutherland lists Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates. Our Lords Temporal are the Monarchy and its aristocratic landed structures of counties and townships. Our Lords Spiritual are the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith…the key divide is between those who believe ‘this is not all there is’ and the Materialists and Atheists who do.

Monarchy, Church and Parliament are the Three Estates and an alliance between the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III will be crucial if we are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants us to go. Halford Mackinder got it right a century ago when he remarked in Democratic Ideals & Reality that the real political battle is always between Locality and Outside Interests.

It was warm on Saturday night…and for once there was no cloudburst in the afternoon to soak the Rye Bonfire on The Salts. I had spent the afternoon in Ashford and came back to Rye on a packed 1730 train bringing hundreds of revellers from all over Kent and Sussex to Rye’s Guy Fawkes Celebrations.

Vemara had a Grandstand View of the Fireworks Display set off on the opposite bank. But first was the procession through the town. So at 7.30 pm it was up the Ypres Steps, through St Mary’s Churchyard, down Lion Street and along the High Street to The Mint. But I was back on Vemara by nine o’clock. This was my second free show of the Fireworks Season. Last Sunday…on the real November the Fifth…I had joined Françoise de Naillat on her balcony in St Leonard’s. Money is still no object for people. Fireworks are cheap…and the bank rate is still only five percent.

It is so easy to transfer manufacturing to low-cost economies that Dell, Nokia, Ikea, Glaxo and L’Oréal sell everywhere and produce nowhere. By outsourcing their manufacturing these Global Gamblers leave themselves with just the Design and Marketing.

But Manufacturing is volatile and capital-intensive so outsourcing transfers Economic Volatility of Capital Investment and Inventory Cycles alongside the Job Slavery and the Dark Satanic Mills. Trade Surpluses used to indicate Economic Dynamism but in this World Gone Mad (WGM) a reluctance to integrate fully with the Global Economy and pursue WTO-style Free Trade is regarded as evidence of a need for destabilisation.

In Britain and the United States, globalisation seems to have brought economic stability and made borrowing safe. Integration of global capital markets has also allowed countries with a high Propensity to Borrow…like America, Britain and Spain…to take advantage of the Private Savings of more cautious cultures like Japan and Germany.

Nobody can explain any of this…and nobody seems to believe that it can go any other way than to Crash. This is one thing where the opinion of the Man in the Street is little different from that of the Academic Economist in her Ivory Tower and the City Banker in his Knightsbidge Palace. The difference is that ordinary people are now talking openly about The Crash and no longer feel the need to keep up the pretence that what is going on makes any sense.

Finance-led globalisation has opened a Pandora’s Box with the tails of the Merchant Class wagging the dog of the Statesmen. At the end of the 19th century when Britain ruled the waves no one had the vaguest notion that a hundred years hence imperial expansion would lead to Reverse Colonisation and Intra-Diaspora Global Trading.

Forty years ago Enoch Powell insisted there were questions to be addressed. And forty years before that Mahatma Gandhi glimpsed the shape of things to come when he addressed the Manchester Textile Workers. But not even his visionary mind was capable of grasping the idea that three quarters of century hence an Indian Steel Company would buy the Mighty Steelworks of South Wales…lock, stock and barrel. But that is exactly what happened last month.

In the late 19th century in the days of the British Raj the 130-room Watson Hotel in downtown Bombay was the classiest place in town. There is a legend that Jamshedji Tata…a Parsi textile trader and the founding father of India’s foremost industrial house…was so angry to be turned away at its richly carpeted door on the ground that he had brown skin that he built his own luxury hotel in defiance. The Tata Group’s majestic Taj Mahal Hotel overlooking the Gateway of India is now the place to be seen in Mumbai for anybody who is anybody.

Meanwhile the sad-looking building that was once Watson’s is home to nondescript law firms, courier companies and photocopying shops. Watson Hotel stands as a salutary lesson to those who underestimate the ambitions of Indian Businessmen.

With last month’s £4.3 billion takeover of Corus…once British Steel and the very epitome of Western Industrialism and British Imperial Strength…Ratan Tata, the Indian Group’s present-day patriarch has proved that Indian Business is a force to reckon with globally. There is a whole lot more to Indian Business than Call Centres.

Instead of being acquired Indian Companies are now acquiring. Ranbaxy Laboratories is a top player in the European Generic Drug market after buying RPG Aventis; Mahindra has picked up Stokes a British automotive forging company, the tractor manufacturing assets of China’s Jiangling Motor and the German Jeco Holdings; Vijay Mallya’s UB Group is planning a £400 million bid for Scotland’s Whyte & Mackay. Where will it all end? Globalisation will have too much impact on the future of too many people to be left to Merchants and Moneylenders.