Douglas Knight

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can?t people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.

As I have been writing for more than twenty years, a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; where serial generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these girls and women have yet more children, and whose own daughters inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and utterly dysfunctional parenting.

The result is fatherless boys who are suffused by an existential rage and desperate psychic need, who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at the world around them. And all this is effectively condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the welfare state which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that welfare fatherlessness brings in its train.

Melanie Phillips Goodbye to the Enlightenment

Allan Carlson The Family Centered Economy

Alexander Chayanov?s emphasis on a farm?s sexual division of labor ?turns marriage into a necessary condition of fully-fledged peasantship.? The family itself is a ?work unit,? with family members fundamentally bonded to each other: husband and wife need each other to survive and prosper; and they, in turn, need children to prosper and survive. Shared labor in a common enterprise binds the family together. Mark Harrison summarizes: Peasant economy reproduces itself through the family. The family is the progenitor of the family life-cycle and of population growth. It is the owner of property. As such, it expresses the fact that the aim of production is household consumption.

Quoting Pitirim Sorokin

Now families are small, and their members are soon scattered?. The result is that the family home turns into a mere ?overnight parking place'.

Quoting Wendell Berry

"We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility? that have been turned over to governments and corporations during the 20th Century and ?put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods.?

Over the last century governments have believed it to be their job to promote economic efficiency. Efficiency is achieved by reducing costs, the chief of which is salaries and pensions, so we attempt to reduce the number of people we employ. But whether the nation is served well solely by efficiency of labour, with the resulting concentration of economic power, is an interesting question. The concentration of power is precisely the effect of every government intervention in industry. Reducing costs tends to mean externalising them, so that they are not borne by that industry itself, but by someone else, such as the nation as a whole at some later time. It may that alongside efficiency, a nation also needs a certain level of economic resilience for too much efficiency may leave us exposed as global economic conditions change.

Take farming. Farming is the most fundamental industry of all. It produces food. You are the one who wants to eat three times day after all. In the good old days when we said ?Grace? before meals we made our daily acknowledgement of those who work in this industry. That is when it was socially acceptable to acknowledge that others work for us, and we may express gratitude in public to them for their work. After decades of improving efficiency we have stopped thanking anyone. Now food appears before us by magic.

There are two trends at work in the British agriculture. One is that the government continues promotes the centralisation of agriculture that began in the Second World War, adopted as the country struggled to feed itself. The aim then was simply to maximise the amount of food produced. Raising production has been the aim of government policy ever since, so our agricultural economy is in this respect is still on war-footing. The other aim is to do so ?efficiently?, by which is meant, with an efficiency of labour, by reducing the number of people employed to produce that food. We do this by importing our food from which ever part of the world can produce it most cheaply. Cheap food sourced from all points of the world makes British farming appear less competitive. After all farmers are also responsible for the way the countryside looks.. In response to this, we have put all farmers on subsidies, which for reasons of national embarrassment we attribute to the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

You will have noticed right away that these two policies are contradictory. We make agriculture more labour efficient by reducing the number of people employed in it. But there are unintended consequences to labour efficiency. Each form of work and industry creates its own culture and a population familiar with it. Reduce the number of people employed in an industry and you reduce our familiarity with that industry and its products. The nation becomes a ignorant of its own agriculture and rural land-use, and so a stranger to the stuff it puts in its own stomach. We have no sense of involvement or achievement in this food. The nation that is disconnected from its own food and that agriculture that produces it, cannot relate the food that its eats, and the health of their own bodies and wider sense of well-being. These two apparently opposite trends have made the British estranged from the food that they eat and the land they live in.

And yet some small, mixed and labour-intensive agriculture might be a good thing. Agriculture does not have to take place solely on an industrial scale. To allow a more mixed economy between the large and the small scale though would mean softening the policy of labour efficiency which has created large agriculture and a large role for government in agriculture.

The initial outlay for anybody entering agriculture at however small a scale is massive. The most valuable thing is the house and outbuildings with land. This sort of agriculture requires that the farmer live on site. He or she doesn't have one single task to perform through one block of time, after which they can leave the site. He has many small tasks to perform. They have livestock that require feeding and perhaps also milking twice daily, and other forms of care on and off throughout the day and sometimes the night. The price of a house with land, which is the entry price for the smallholder, has been inflated out of reach of most by the rest of the housing market. That price is effectively the cost of buying planning consent and so of keeping the planning authorities at bay. No matter how old and derelict that bungalow may be, it represents the right to reside on this land, and outbuildings represent the right to house animals, store animal feed and perhaps even do some of the processing that adds value to your produce. You are paying this initial high cost just so that the planning authorities do not forbid the link between work on site and your 24-hour a day presence on site on which this enterprise is based. The result is that a very few hardy souls engaged in agriculture, needing to protect their farm from animal or human intruders, live in caravans and face constant interrogation and legal action from council planning departments. I know one small farmer who has lost a substantial part of his crop this year because he is unable to stay on site to keep down the predations of birds. But there is one major obstacle to this sort of small scale agriculture. This is the issue of how to afford the piece of land on which there is both some kind of dwelling and some outbuildings. This combination has been all but driven out of existence by the British fixation with the houses as store of value.

Over many years the policies of governments have brought about a separation of life and work, and so between housing and employment. Living takes place in the house you bought: a house is simply a residence and its garden. To work you have to leave the house and travel elsewhere. You will of course be using oil in order to travel between these two places, and an increasing proportion of that oil has to be imported, and paid for by selling things to oil-producing countries. This will continue for only as long as other countries value what we have to sell them more than they value their oil. If they ever decide that they need that oil themselves, and have none left over to export to us, every place in this country will suddenly find that it is a very long way from every other place. We will wonder then why we decided to place work and houses so far away from one. We may not find it so easy to bring productive work back to the places in which people live. A country that has no small scale agriculture has no buffer against those sudden movement of oil and other inputs, that might knock farmers out and leave just when food imports become much more expensive for the country as a whole.

There is a complete gap between life and work. We live, together as families, and we work, as individuals, without the family. We have made it near impossible for a family to work to together. We have made it difficult for anyone to produce even a small proportion of their own requirements. We have made impossible any kind of self-sustenance that might give each household a little buffer of economic independence. We have made the peasant life impossible. We have made it impossible to live any life but the middle-class life, working in offices or the working class life, working in distribution centres. Both these forms of existence rely on importing most of what this country needs and so rely on one most implausible thing, a steady oil price. When food is cheap and unemployment is high, it is not obvious that we need labour-efficient agriculture. What we need is labour-intensive agriculture. Labour-intensive agriculture does mean that someone works such long and variable hours that they have to live and work in the same place. Then we would have to concede that those engaged in it will have to live and work in the same place.

Government polices the division between residing and working, dwelling and work-place. The house that unites dwelling and work-place achieves a level of autonomy that means less opportunity for the supermarkets and other corporations, and less role for government. Of course this is not because just the state is attempting to do too much, but because the British demand that it constantly step in. Every economic policy in Britain is about the housing market and so about credit. The house is the great British deity. It is my neighbours who ask the planning officers to decide whether I have permission to do things that might spoil the view from their window and threaten the value of their house. The planning system sees to it that a house cannot be a work place, and that a place of work cannot be lived in. The planning system protects this division by enforcing the regulations that has removed work from home. You cannot work where you live, so you cannot work together with your family. A family cannot be engaged in a common work. Different generations may not work together, so your children will not learn about work, what to do and how to do it, directly from you.

So the smallholder has to haul himself over many obstacles, and so is bound to be exhausted, not by the physical labour of farming but by the demand that they present themselves as unpaid off-site employees of the government, responsible to other employees of the government, of each other whom has their own reasons to demonstrate how indispensible their arbitration is. The smallholder is always up on charges of having breached regulations, most of which could only be relevant to much larger businesses. But perhaps most small business men think themselves as counter-cultural too. Since so much legislation is limits the amount of labouring that actually takes place, it looks as though the British just don?t like labour and are determined to save one another from it. The result is that the British have a poor diet and an agriculture and food industry that are vulnerable to the movements of global markets over which the British government is powerless. Concentrating the regulative power of government to disconnect of life from work, particularly in the countryside, may not be the right policy.

The obvious way to go for the smallholder is to aim for crops that will earn cash. Many present themselves as any other farmer, simply on a smaller scale. Falling prices have made agriculture technology-dependent, more heavily capitalised so that that individual farmers are often precariously over-borrowed and one harvest away from losing the farm. But every crop requires an outlay, and it is difficult to make this outlay without borrowing. But this leaves them exposed to movement of stock prices. If you borrow, you give yourself little chance of surviving a sudden drop of price for your products. Like any medium and large highly-capitalised farmer may find within a single season that he cannot afford to buy the inputs (seed, fertiliser, irrigation) or the services of the agricultural contractors and so either cannot get a crop in the ground or he cannot harvest and dry it. But if perhaps for reasons that have nothing to do with us, other countries cannot sell oil at the prices we have got used to, this long settlement, which is the policy of governments over many decades may come unhitched. Perhaps if you aim for survival, and try a number of products without high start-up costs, you may give yourself a better chance. For years livestock prices have been dropping. But as the pound weakens imports will become more expensive and our own produced lamb and beef seem likely to fetch better prices. The Chinese are eating the lamb that the UK used to import from New Zealand so our own lamb-producers are doing better than they have. But who knows? Perhaps it is better to aim for a range of low value products and survival rather than cash. If you produce your own you will not be quite so exposed to rising food prices, and may even benefit from them. You will be on the right side of the curve, as they say.

Because of the centrality of credit to our economy, we define work by its relationship with money and debt. Work is only ever about doing A in order to gain the medium by which to obtain Z. We almost never manage any closer connection between our own output and our own requirements, between what we create and what we consume. Money must reign supreme. Wicked the man who attempts to provide anything for his family that has not been procured through the market by the earning and spending of money. If we managed to avoid earning and spending money how would be it be possible for governments to raise taxes? How would it be possible to create new jobs in government for those who believe that the rest of us need their supervision? This gap between living and houses on one hand, and work and the appropriate location for it on the other can never be closed. All power to the centre!

The British Government is right to make the austerity effort ? even if it is hopeless. But accepting the relatively generous debt forgiveness that might eventually attract, the gaping hole in Camerlot?s plans still remains the same as that of Tory economic strategy since Thatcher: no creativity in terms of marketing, diversification and self-sufficiency is being applied to the problem. With Conservative ministers, the problem as always is, they simply don?t get out enough.

The Cabinet watches an appalling traffic accident taking place in the eurozone, and continues to trot out drivel about our future being ?inextricably linked? to that disaster area. Is that the best they can offer? It looks on as banks spit in the face of entrepreneurial business risk, too scared to so much as mention the word regulation, when the rest of us are thinking more in terms of castration. It presides over a farming community on its uppers, when a major part of our problem is the enormous mountain of food we import?and a major part of our EU contribution involves the obscene feather-bedding of French agriculture. And above all, it fails to grasp the obvious reality of Britain?s plight: that our current economic balance and structure stands zero chance of ever employing, on a full-time basis, the citizens we have to support in this tiny island. (Disgracefully, it is backing away from immigration pledges, and bowing meekly to potty Leftist and CBI arguments about needing to import ?trained? labour while we have 2.4 million unemployed). Since the latter part of the Victorian era, occupations in Britain have been wiped out one by one: domestic service, skilled tradesmen, miners, factory workers, farming, independent shopkeepers, roadsweepers, clerks, secretaries, soldiers, policemen, and a thousand other jobs: all have been sacrificed on the altar of mechanisation, multiple supermarkets, shareholder demands, DIY sheds, IT and ? the worst cancer of all ? the ridiculous aim that everyone must have a University degree, however useless. Exacerbating this job shrinkage is the staggering trend towards full-time working women, nil-time working benefit cheats, and a tiny, electronically-driven banking community of some 50,000 adults driving over 60% of the economy. Who but a congenital idiot would imagine that Britain could support an adult population of a hundred times that number with an economy more suited to a ritzy suburb of Zurich?

John Ward Where Are The Ideas?

I have six children. I sat with them, read with them, worked with them, encouraged them, imparted wisdom to them, nurtured their intellects, fed their ambitions, opened their minds, instructed them in life, all its failures and successes. I conversed with them, poured over dictionaries with them, pointed and showed them the world around them, explained their rights and their responsibilities to them. I cared for them because I am their father, it is my job. If the State wants to assume all of the above, then 500,000 Fabians are the very WORST people to do it. All they have been taught is dependency, entitlement, compliancy, uniformity and slavery, the very WORST education a child can receive. My children deserved better. So I made sure they received it. They thrived in spite of the State, something we all need to learn. But don?t expect to be taught it by anyone employed by the State.

Old Holborn

There was a short but brutal drought in the East of England this year. It is over now, but from March to May, there was no rain, at all. But the problem is not so much that there wasn?t any rain, but that the condition of the soil means that it cannot hold onto winter rain and make it available to crops through dry months. This spring was particularly bad because we had had a dry winter, and this after last year?s dry spring. We will have to dig the field drains up, so that less winter rainfall runs into the ditches. Our field is protected only by its own hedges, so there is little shelter from the wind that blows across the much larger fields all around. The wind draws what moisture there is out of the soil, and the water level drops faster than our crops can grow roots to find it. We have planted a belt of trees round the whole field, but not many survived the drought.

This brought home what I suppose we already knew in some intellectual way. It is difficult to do small-scale agriculture in the East of England. One reason why the land is difficult farm on the small-scale is that for many decades no one has kept animals on it. There is no mixed farming in the Eastern counties anymore. All farms are arable: most have a five year rotation of two wheat, two rape and a year of beans. No organic matter from animal manure returned to the soil to help it hold on to that water or prevent it from becoming so compacted that plant roots cannot develop properly.

In the East of England in particular the expectation is that all land has to be farmed on an increasingly large scale by fewer farmers with larger machines. All nutrients are dosed and applied to the specific crop, and the soil is just there to hold that crop up. Farmers take on more borrowing in order to do this, and some are always being forced out when they cannot borrow any more. The process of concentration is beginning to resemble the collectivisation of agriculture. All power to the kolkhozy!

The logic of vertical streaming means that large scale agricultural enterprises, agrochemical companies and food giants and supermarkets want to, if not to integrate, at least to achieve more control over it than is good for the market or for national health. Supermarket chains will increase loyalty incentives for their customers until the supermarkets effectively divide up the customers available between them. Supermarkets will be the farmers and consumers their livestock. The problem is that this makes for a population with such low earning power that it will be unable to purchase what these collectives can produce. Supermarkets will respond by reducing the nutritional value of the food they sell. Never underestimate the technological ability of the food industry to dilute real nutritional value whilst loudly informing us of the many individual supplements that provide the health benefits of their products. They will be dosing the nutrients into the customers, and the population will be kept on an increasingly poor diet. Long live our agricultural corporations! Truly they provide for us like a loving mother.

More agriculture in the next post. So much easier than theology.

There are many pacts of mutual dependency, some good, some not so. Let's have a look a couple that are not so good, and which are vaguely related. We'll start with the global, then look at the local.

The Middle East supplies us with cheap oil. There is oil elsewhere in world, but it hasn?t come onto the market yet because it is too expensive for us to extract. Over many happy decades our industry, and our societies, have got used to this cheap oil. So used to it that it is now a question whether we could convert to the more expensive stuff, which is soon to be the only oil there is. Without oil, we are capable of no economic activity at all. The West is on a petroleum dole, which the Arabs (and Russians and Venezuelans) are kind enough to supply. So far, we do not resent being on this dole, and they do not resent supplying it.

But this is another dole which flows the other way. The Middle East does not feed itself. Both the rich oil-exporters, with their smaller populations, like Saudi and the Gulf States, and the poor oil-importers with their larger populations, like Egypt and Syria, import their food. The Middle East relies on the grain dole from grain exporting countries, which chiefly means from the United States. In Egypt and Syria, food makes up more than half household budgets, so rises in the price of bread and other necessities can quickly create panic. Rising grain prices, caused by some poor harvests and by China?s growing demand and exacerbated by speculation, will continue to cause upheaval in the Middle East. Political instability would keep the oil price volatile. Then there is the fact that there is no more cheap oil to pump. We have reached the ceiling ? at least of the cheap oil. Not even Saudi Arabia, that Western stooge, can increase the amount it is pumping to save us the West from economic implosion. Its rulers know that if the West suffers a depression there will be less demand for the oil and so reduced revenues to pay for domestic peace in Saudi Arabia.

So, if they don't grow their own food, don?t have an adequate agriculture (and certainly not an adequate industry) what do these Middle Eastern countries do? You know the answer to that. They have babies. This the advantage of Islam: it is unashamed and easily-enforced patriarchy. Women are unable to say no to it, so child-bearing is their lot. The Western grain dole to the Middle East has subsidised a decades-long population explosion. Unfortunately these large poor populations are so undeveloped economically that they are unable to buy our services, so we cannot help them and they cannot help us to grow out of our dependencies. If these countries don't have oil, or can't pump more oil, and don?t have other industrial sectors, and aided by this Western grain dole their ideological patriarchy creates rising populations with no experience of civil society or economic self-reliance, what is to stop these populations from sinking further into destitution. More upheaval will make the oil price even more unpredictable for us, and so make it less easy to make the transition from the present cheap oil to the more expensive stuff of the future? Doles are not good for them. And their failure to establish a mature political culture is not going to be good for us.

But it could be that the United States and the rest of us are now so dependent on oil that is cheap, that we also vulnerable to sudden price movements. Could we adapt in time to the steep climb in oil price that would make US shale oils become economical to extract? The disappearance of the cheap oil could be so sudden that we cannot make the technological switch quickly enough to bring the more difficult, more expensive to extract, reserves on line. If price rises take oil beyond the reach of a large proportion of the population, they will be out of work, and soon living a much more hand-to-mouth existence. Even if oil became cheaper again, there would not be equivalent return of demand through re-investment and re-hiring. The damage would have been done. If the Middle East had a stronger political culture, the oil price might have been pushed up so steadily over a long enough period that we could all have reduced our dependence on it.

Closer to home there is another one-way dependency is at work. Here in the UK every corner shop is owned and run by Pakistanis, Indians, or in my part of London, by Turks. These Muslims (together with Hindus and Sikhs to be sure) keep those corner shops open. Every evening you will see the British going out to buy their alcohol from Muslims. Those who despise alcohol sell it. It is another of those self-hatred pacts that have turned into a mutual-contempt pact. They sell this alcohol to single white men who, having no family of their own, live alone, and need the alcohol in order to experience a few hours escape from possessive individualism into the solidarity of the tribe. If you are still on your own, or on your own again, in your forties you need a certain amount of alcohol. You have control the feeling that everyone else is part of a family, that you have been discarded and are the only one who is on their own. A few beers keep at bay that dread sense that you are either repugnant or invisible to everyone else in the street.

So we here in the UK are entirely dependent on the extended family, albeit the extended Asian family that runs the corner shop that sells you the booze that takes you out of isolation and into the great tribe of the happy. Without these corner shops, therefore, many British people would never experience any sense of being members of the group. Unlike the rest of us, Asians live and work in extended families. In the three-generation household, grandparents look after grandchildren, freeing up parents so that they can keep these shops open all hours. In the extended family every adult works without taking a wage out of the business, and this is what allows these corner shops to remain open. The British nuclear family, made of husband and wife alone, cannot keep up the eighteen hour days, cannot afford to pay staff from these small takings, and probably cannot endure the boredom of taking a large number of very small value transactions from the drunk or disturbed. So, since they are dependent on staying happy through the services of corner shop, which is manned by them, the British are entirely dependent on the extended family. They are not dependent on their own family, but someone else?s.

Now back to that other dependency. What happens if we consume our way through all the cheap oil? Remember it is the political weakness of the Middle East, not unrelated to Islam?s inability to allow developed political institutions, that has meant that oil has been kept so cheap for so long. This means that we will not experience a long slow rise in the price of oil, but a sudden and rapid one, perhaps too rapid to give our economy time to adjust. Many will be thrown out of work. What happens to this out-of-work population? If they think that this is all the fault of other people, of capitalism and government, there will be political upheaval, and lawlessness and violence. Each of us will find a new family in the mob. But mostly, each of them will believe that their circumstances are the result of their own personal inadequacy. Then each will retreat to the chair before the TV and drink themselves to death, drink becoming more important in home or food, so that they disappear individually, and no one notices.

Everyone is talking about default and forgiveness. Debt forgiveness means debt cancellation. We could write down one another?s mortgages, or, if we delay because we realise what this will cost us, that debt will be defaulted on and repudiated entirely anyway. This would mean that all our savings and pensions disappear at a stroke, large numbers of us become destitute and the country goes into economic depression. So, for those who are closer to the end of their careers than the beginning, forgiveness is not without cost.

We have put one another on two sets of doles. The older have put the young into more debt than they can carry, and making unlikely that the young will succeed economically, and more likely that they will default on their debts to the old. By placing such levels of debt onto the young the old have put themselves into danger. The Westerners have give up the extended family, but have made their own children dependent on the liquid comfort provided by our corner shops, thereby ensuring that those extended Asian families will inherit the high street ? though theirs may also be the only business still open there. And Westerners have made it more difficult to take their cheap oil dole from the Middle East. They have subsidised and supported populations which are so weak politically that they could not push up the price enough in order to hang onto their oil reserves, and so weak economically that they could not prevent even what agriculture they did have from being destroyed by cheap imported grain. So doles are not good. They make dependent populations even more dependent. This is as true for oil-dependent Western nations as it is for bread-dependent Arab ones.

You can see where I am going with this. Let us all learn from the Asians. A three-generation family keeps more of the product of its labour in house and so is less exposed to volatile prices, of oil in particular. Let us go back to our parents, and say ?Parents, I have sinned against you and am no more worthy to be called your son.? Indicate that you have nowhere else to go, and that you will be relieved if they let you live in the garden shed. You have to explain the new economic conditions to them, and hint that your circumstances are not just a result of your own fecklessness. Over time it might even occur to them that they could ask for your forgiveness, since they have granted themselves pension entitlements that have shoved their own offspring into debt bondage, so that the world of opportunity, which we all so recently took for granted, has now disappeared.

I have been a life-long beneficiary of forgiveness myself. But I do know that to get forgiveness you will have to apply for the garden shed. If we can crawl back together to become three-generation families we will not be quite so exposed as all these various doles come to an end. The three-generation family is the future. I hope you find your own.

St Patrick's Soho Square is re-opening after 14 months of renovation work

Tuesday 31st May 2011 6pm Mass The Principal Celebrant will be His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols. The Mass will include the premiere of a choral work by James MacMillan.

Wednesday 1st June 2011 6pm First Vespers of the Ascension presided over by the Right Reverend James Conley, Auxiliary Bishop of Denver followed by a private, invitation-only address from the noted American scholar Prof George Weigel on ?Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the West?

Thursday 2nd June 2011 6pm Solemn Mass of The Ascension celebrated by His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney

See you there

Credit at very low rates of interest is treated as ?free money,? for that?s what it is in essence. Recipients of free money quickly become dependent on that flow of credit to pay their expenses, which magically rise in tandem with the access to free money. Thus when access to free money is suddenly withdrawn, the recipient experiences the same painful withdrawal symptoms as a drug addict who goes cold turkey. Free money soon flows to malinvestments as fiscally sound investments are quickly cornered by State-cartel partnerships and favored quasi-monopolies. The misallocation of capital is masked by the asset bubble which inevitably results from massive quantities of free money seeking a speculative return... credit-poor economies are suddenly offered unlimited credit at very low or even negative interest rates. It is ?an offer that?s too good to refuse? and the resultant explosion of private credit feeds what appears to be a ?virtuous cycle? of rampant consumption and rapidly rising assets such as equities, land and housing...everyone and his sister can suddenly afford to speculate in housing, stocks, commodities, etc., and to live a consumption-based lifestyle that was once the exclusive preserve of State Elites... the addictive substance is credit and the speculative and consumerist fever it fosters. The ?too big to fail? Eurozone banks ... could loan virtually unlimited sums to the weaker sovereign states or their proxies. This led to over-consumption by the importing States and staggering profits for the TBTF Eurozone banks. And all the while, the citizens enjoyed the consumerist paradise of borrow and spend today, and pay the debts tomorrow. Tomorrow arrived, and now the capital foundation - housing and the crippled budgets of post-bubble Member States -has eroded to the point of mass insolvency.

Charles Hugh Smith Why the EU is doomed

The Coalition has been dealt some ghastly cards, and most of the short-term blame for the coming real austerity lies firmly with the bankers and New Labour over-spenders who put flash and news conference bollocks before real needs. But over the long-term, the lack of foresight about demographic trends (and the need to diversify our economy) have been pushed down the road by successive governments since the early 1970s. And of course, we cannot leave this subject without noting that the gold-pensioned Mandarins have given very little in the way of advice over that time. Arse-covering, vote-catching and mad greed have, together, hastened our arrival at this awful cliff-face. But the disaster will be ten times worse than it need be if the current Government doesn?t realise that this is a national emergency ? one to make Dunkirk look like a gentle regatta. I could?ve delved far more deeply into the knock-on tidal wave of effects that will result from rising interest rates and growing national debt repayments; but after a while with statistics, a sort of snow-blindness kicks in.

John Ward What lies ahead

In recent weeks The Slog has been revealing the extent to which the many minions of Rupert Murdoch keep cropping up in the Hackgate saga, part of the long and complex corruption of the British political and media establishment. Strangely The Slog has also had difficulties with internet service providers, so goes offline for periods without good reason being given.

There?s so much going on at the Thomas More Institute

For example, Wednesday 6th April, Rt. Rev. Michael J. Nazir-Ali What has Christian Faith to Do with Essential Values?