Episode Two of the Slog’s eye on the stuff most people miss

 

The EU slip is showing.

There’s not much doubt that Axel Weber would’ve been a shoe-in for Europe’s new central banker post after Jean-Claude Trichet  is dragged screaming retires from his ECB post next October. But Axel has told Angela Merkel he wants to spend more time with his money from now on, and so somebody else will have to stand in from of the eurofan as solids emerge unpredictably from its blades.

Despite yet more lashings of spin-balm, the EU is back at the precipice. Portugal is facing growing distrust from the markets, with bond spreads at record levels again. The EFSF expansion talks are going nowhere, and the Irish ECB bank bailout alone is over fifty billion euros – far more than originally planned, and still growing without any known end.

So bad are things in Dublin, Opposition Fina Gael leader Enda Kenny met with Merkel this morning to discuss how the leakage might be stemmed under an FG administration.

The succession squabbling will not be pretty. But the Germans will get who they want, because that’s how things are these days. The key point is that, under the hemline of Europe’s ankle-length skirts, there are still all kinds of funny things going on. As The Slog has been saying for weeks, nobody of any stature in the markets thinks the EU can get away with less than one bailout and one default in 2011. What nobody knows thus far is, if Germany doesn’t cave in, where the money’s going to come from.

Infighting at the MPC

Sessions of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee are (I’m told) anything but ladylike these days. Its inflation obsessive Andrew Sentance will be the keynote speaker at this week’s Intitute of Economic Affairs (IEF) gathering, and I understand that Mervyn King is somewhat frantic about what Sentance might say.

As the inflation figures are out tomorrow and expected to show further acceleration, the Governor will have to write yet another explanatory letter to Chancellor Osborne. If my maths are right, I think thst now makes five since the Coalition came to ‘power’. Given that the vast majority of this problem is down to music-shirking politicians, I often wonder why Merv has to write to Osborne, when really Brown should be writing to Merv. But that isn’t going to change the reality – viz, between Tuesday and Thursday, Andrew Sentance is likely to pen the odd vitriolic sentence about why interest rates should be going up.

Markets get upset when anyone tells the truth, especially when such truths pinpoint King’s central problem: with an economy slumping and and a currency inflating, he’s pig-stuck either way.

The UK’s borrowing costs will rise, and its currency value will fall. Both of these things will, respectively, increase the size of the deficit, and put up the cost of raw material imports. Hell, handcart, etc etc.

Lies, damned lies, and evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry.

Jeremy Paxman finds himself this week admonished by the Beeb’s spineless Colonel Blimps Governors for writing in an article that Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq war was ‘based on lies’. At the Iraq Digest site, the tireless Chris Ames continues to point out what a load of old bollocks the entire New Labour and Blair defence is, while maintaining a truly majestic (and genuine) objectivity about all aspects of the Inquiry.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. Blair and Bush had already cooked up a rationale for regime change long before WMD became an ‘issue’. Goldsmith’s defence of our entry into the war (based on him being out of the US/UK diplomatic loop) has been shown to be false. And lest you be uncertain, I write this as a bloke who foolishly believed the WMD fiction at the time.

So it begs the question, why has Paxo been admonished? And a whole heap of other questions – like why is the BBC repeating these shibboleths, how has Goldsmith escaped prosecution, why is Tony Blair still at large, and can we have our £13 billion back please, or is this just another downside of the Special Relationship?

Will the person in A&E please try and stand up.

Many of us remember the reign of Kulcha Ministrette Tessa Jowell over the nation’s cultural revival. We smile while recalling her desire for every town and village to have a casino. We laugh at the memory of her replacement of the licensing laws with The Pissheads’ Charter.

But we laugh rather less today as the long-predicted swamping of A&E with drunks comes to pass.

In 2011, over a million more people end up in hospital casualty departments as a result of binge drinking than they did in 2005. This is costing the NHS £2.7 billion a year more than it was when the hopelessly estranged wife of Mr Jowell came up with her drinky-winky plans in 2006….at which time, spookily, her unestranged husband increased his exposure to the vagaries of brewery shares. This act by hubby followed a long period of informal financial negotations with bunga-bunga man and Tony Blair intimate Silvio Berlusconi.

The CEO of Alocohol Concern told the media today that “successive governments have failed to act decisively in treating the country’s drink problem”, but The Slog is forced to take issue with this conclusion. Mr & Mrs Jowell seem to me to have helped themselves liberally to the problem.