I read the news today, oh boy – 4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire

The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

While David Cameron does a bit of overweight body-surfing in Cornwall, I’d like to point out that his Twitter mantra – ‘This shows that the Government’s long-term economic policy is working’- needs some refinement. The most succinct improvement would involve the addition of one word (‘not’) and then to try and find a sensible, community-based alternative to the spineless Labour Opposition…whose fat MPs are also doubtless fulfilling invites to various Vodka palaces across the Mediterranean.

Here is the most telling selection from the rapidly growing army of logic, in its battle against the dark forces of enslaved legislators:

1. The fastest-growing sector of Britain’s supermarkets is the cut-price discount sector. Lidl is now bigger than Waitrose. So, um, if more people have jobs than before, why is this the case?

2. While London is the richest City in Europe with the highest standard of living, why does the UK as a whole have 8 of the 10 poorest regions in the EU? Can we at least lay this at Boris Johnson’s door? Do you have a regional policy?

3. If Britain is, as you claim, the fastest-growing developed EU State, why is the British Establishment so keen to stay in Europe?

4. If what we’re seeing in Europe is a weak recovery, why are the two biggest markets behind Germany going backwards in terms of gdp?

5. If QE has saved our skins, why is it now not working in Japan or China?

6. Eurozone GDP still isn’t back to its 2007 levels. So where is our export growth coming?

7. Not from China: its growth has markedly slowed, and anyway we don’t make anything they want. So where are our exports going to be sold?

8. Not in Russia: July saw a sharp decline in energy demand, and most of Russia’s profitable exports involve oil and gas. So where are our exports going to be sold?

9. Not in the United States: there are too many part-time workers who want to work full time, too many people going back to College, and economists say there are still too many factors giving mixed signals. This makes it impossible to develop a coherent policy….as Janet Yellen’s incoherent maybe yes or no not sure Jackson Hole speech proved beyond any doubt last week. So where are our exports going to be sold?

10. If Britain’s doing so well, why is the National Debt still rising?

Ours is not a virtual world existing only in a Cloud somewhere. There are no castles in the air, no sunny uplands ahead, no sudden recoveries to confound the doubters. There is only the odd niche glimmer, or the occasional attempt to spin success from failure. A jobless recovery is a recovery of no value. Zirp is not a viable future in which business can be funded. QE is merely a con trick using the gambler’s own money…take it out of gdp calculations where it has been tried, and weak recoveries become depressions. Real growth is no longer sustainable….and on many levels, it should be abandoned in favour of adjusted expectations.

In Russia, China, the US, the eurozone, Britain, India, Singapore and Africa, one trend dominates all others: a tiny minority of the very rich getting richer, and upwards of 60% getting poorer. An economic model based largely on quantitative consumption is mathematically doomed to failure in the light of that mind-bogglingly obvious fact.

Thatcher and Reagan are well on the way to becoming the 20th Century’s Marx and Hegel: totally wrong, but still admired by the fanatics. Almost every Congressman in the US is in somebody’s pocket on somebody’s payroll. Almost every MP in Britain is either directly sponsored by a special interest group, or lobbied by globalists and banks in return for personal and Party donations. In the EU, as the economy flatlines, bureaucrats award themselves a budget increase, and meddle in the affairs of Ukraine. The White House backs them, plots against Syrian Alawhites, and talks of a return to Iraq. Almost all this arsing about offers two rewards for these lunatics: distraction, and energy gains.

You cannot run an economic world on the basis of glorified barter between currencies with no common value point. You cannot recreate honest trade and craft values with factory robots and paper derivative fantasies. You cannot have social policies beneficial for the greater majority when a 1% political élite is directly answerable to a 3% greedy administrative, business and banking oligarchy. You cannot restart a capitalist consumption economy if over half the population has either no confidence or no job. And you cannot have a free press there to print empirical reality if almost all of it is in the hands of those who pay the élite.

It is the path of mad people almost gagging for Danté’s inferno to meet Hogarth’s Bedlam. It is the barabarians sacking the museums. It is, in the end, the Nazis burning books.

Earlier at The Slog: France in a mess, Italy in debtors’ prison