Martin Meenagh blog

Britain's Mortgaged Future The Private Finance Initiative now costs at least £151,000,000,000 One of the reasons the USA has been unsuccessful in its attempt to fix economic problems by cutting interest rates lately is that its 'policy classes' have failed a test of basic honesty. Policy class is an ugly word, but at least points you, reader, to the idea that America, like the UK, now has a group of people in the media, finance, politics and public life who are far less open minded and far more collective in their corporate outlook than for very many years. They count personal crisis and challenge as something to do with some mundane trouble; they never fought wars, they never faced death, they never actually understood what radical honesty means in public. So they ignore truths or focus on spin. You cannot solve a problem arising from the combination of a monetary inflation, fiscal incontinence and a loss of competitiveness, with easy interest rate cuts. All you will get i...

Sensible Social Ownership. I am no mad fan of nationalisation for its own sake. There are some things government has proved bad at, like education in England, or the provision of medical care rather than the funding for it. However, it is time to ask why we don't have some sort of social control of utilities, transport, and energy. It is also time to ask why we have the private sector providing police services, collecting information about the public, and getting hugely rich off of what appear to be rubbish contracts to manage the affairs of the people electronically. Even Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is now legally lowering its own liabilities by outsourcing to a companies like Mapperley, Cap Gemini and Capita. The standard justification in England is that the way the UK outsources some of the core businesses of government to the 'private finance initiative' meets several requirements. It is meant to lower public borrowing, and therefore interest rates. It is mean...

Fidel's Blood soaked Island The island of Cuba--and I say this with no sinister irony, given what has probably gone on at Guantanamo Bay over recent years--has often been associated with brutality. One of the things, after all, that gives Hitchcock's masterful Topaz some of it's currency is how true to life some of the things it depicts there actually were. Columbus started it all. He may have been a remarkable sailor--though I think that sooner or later someone would have come across America and told people about it, especially at the end of Europe's long fifteenth century crisis. When Columbus returned to the New World, having been home, he did so as Grand Admiral of the Ocean, viceroy, and governor of Hispaniola and the associated lands that included Cuba. However, Cristobal Colon left life after four voyages with a record of trials for torture, the execution of his crew, the spreading of a disease that killed 5 million Europeans, the herald of illnesses that woul...

Friday Night in Dublin Hello reader. I feel as though I should apologise for neglecting my blog. There you must be, preparing the party hats, having ordered the cake, sure only that I have quit by blog croft, and like the sod beneath your feet, I am back. Well, not quite. I am in a four star hotel in Dublin having been asked to do some business for a friend. I am very conscious that I am in a free and sovereign state, and a smaller somewhat happier one than London. As I left the airport tonight, passengers chatted with the cockney driver, helped each other out with directions and swapped jokes. The hotel I am in, and indeed the airport where I landed was neither obsessed with security nor with extracting money from me; and the shops are not as far as I can tell, a monoculture of franchises. People are neither broken nor forced to hear the honeyed and recorded or read-out language of consultants and managers, which is a feature of English buses and trains these days. They all pretend to...

Abandon Judeo-Christian Culture, Get Burke and Hare on a Global Scale There are businesses in the world that are plasticizing human body parts almost certainly taken from executed criminals and selling them by mail order . These businesses are based in China. They are associated with criminals whom the government of that country is attempting to repress. The famous international autopsist Dr Gunther Von Hagens , who performs public autopsies had in 2004 a factory in China for the purpose of procuring bodies. Der Spiegel, the German magazine, has already drawn attention to the possibility that some 645 of the Doctor's cadavers are those of prisoners or homeless people. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Dr Von Hagens is involved in any criminal activity. He did, however, return seven corpses on the basis that they probably came from executed people some time ago. Dr Von Hagens has now moved on to selling slices of human bodies commercially. This sort of thing was done quite a b...

Finally, Something Sensible Weeks and weeks ago it became obvious that the solution to the Northern Rock banking crisis in England was to nationalise the bank. Instead, the government cast about for bidders whilst throwing biliions and billions of taxpayers' money at the failing institution. It did so whilst bosses of the bank obtained bonuses and payments vastly in excess of the median wage and their normal salaries. Why did it do so? The answer seems to be that, like German and Spanish governments recently (and for all we know, others too) the establishment in this country cannot allow a bank to fail. We have a western world now predicated upon credit and debt at all levels (and I'm no angel in my personal finances) like rarely before, and to an extent never before seen. So the past few weeks have seen Spanish banks gain huge facilities at the European Central Bank. German banks joined in later with vast government-backed bailouts. The process has now become general , to th...

Sunday Musings 2 As has long been an obvious danger, the decision of the Democratic Party in the United States to adapt its internal democracy to racial arguments is on the verge of getting it into severe trouble. If neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama win a majority of delegates, including 'superdelegates' by June, they face a fight on the floor of the Denver convention in the summer before they know which of them is to be the Democrat nominee for President. This after spending the better part of half a billion and seeing off many other candidates, and while John McCain cruises to the Republican nomination. The Democrats decided some time ago to compensate for what was seen as a 'white' bias in their primary and caucus system to advance two contests; one for hispanics, in Nevada, and one for South Carolina, to accomodate what was effectively a black majority primary. This when it is hard to imagine a more liberal Democrat caucus than Iowa. The Democrats could not ...

And While I am at it... Here is the beautiful, poignant, awful hymn to the last man who could have stopped the waste and the debt and the violence and the cynical, short sighted 'realism' that derailed the past forty years and which there is every day a chance to displace. It's from the film 'Bobby', and it is very touching.

Sicut Erat in Principio, et nunc, et semper, et in Saeculae Saeculorum I grew up in a steeltown that BBC World now uses to illustrate social decay in Britain. The Conservative Parliamentary candidate in my old town was a contemporary at Oxford, and has grown rich on throwaway books about sex. She offers a place in her new novel and charity drivel as an incentive to vote for her in the constituency her party devastated, whilst playing up resentment about the perception of how 'white and British' Corby is that subsists amongst her counterparts in the governing class. There are people I went to school with who died in ditches with needles in their arm whom I have not forgotten, and friends and family who are buried in municipal cemeteries and church graveyards in England and Ireland who were young and old. I have not forgotten them, nor the lives cut short nor the disappointments of the old. My old school was shut down by those who hated religion and the world I was handed was o...

Count Arthur Strong Two Sundays ago, I went to one of the funniest and most enjoyable shows I have ever seen with my pal. We saw Count Arthur Strong live at the London Arts Theatre. Steve Delaney's character is a befuddled, pompous and frankly strange northern actor with what appears to be a neurological problem whose activities are mad and life affirming. We laughed ourselves silly. If you ever get a chance to hear Count Arthur on the radio or cd, because his radio and verbal comedy is his best, grab it. Here, however, is something I found on you tube that just gives a flavour of the man. In it, he discourses on one of his favourite topics, or at least it has been since he got wind of the fees involved--Egyptian alcohology.

Honesty in Government There is currently a wild mismatch between the way that governments in Britain officially report what is happening to the economy and what is really going on. This is very destructive of what little trust remains in Britain's overextended government. For instance, as my regular reader will know, I am sometimes to be found wandering around late night supermarkets with a confused look on my face searching for bread like St John on Patmos, and last year I discovered the fact that a loaf for under £1.10 was not to be had. I did the Atkins diet for a long time, and then went for loose wholemeal rolls, so shouldn't be that surprising to you. I haven't just discovered sliced bread. Anyway, this condition of high expense in the basics of life is now spreading. Wheat and oil prices have been going up everywhere because of demand in the world rising. The oil price rise has hit supermarkets, which have lines of supply that depend upon large trucks moving at all h...

The Descent It became fashionable in the late nineteen eighties, and almost de rigeur in the nineteen nineties to patronize the people of 1929. A host of new, flashy telehistorians and political commentators reduced the past to simple forks in the road of history. If only Hitler had been stopped at the Rhineland, they wrote, or if only Stressemann had not died, or if only the Smoot-Hawley tariff had not been passed, or if only the US had joined in with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The if onlies proliferated, and in part they were marketing exercises. There's nothing wrong with that. However, they missed both the vital interlinkage of the disaster of the early twentieth century and one other critical fact. The men (and few women) of business, the common sense people of the time, thought that there were overwhelming arguments to do what they did. They would have thought that it was our perspective that was deranged, given what seemed logical at the time. Very often, it is the...

Monday is Our Lady of Lourdes Day As the title suggests, Monday is the day for the Catholic remembrance of the apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes. The shrine that commemorates the eighteen visions of St Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 describes itself as the 'most visited pilgimage place in the world', which I presume includes Mecca, and is therefore of course a cultural phenomenon. It stands within an area which has been associated with Marianism for over eight hundred years, and should not be confused with the Fatima Visions of 1917 which warned of a century of communism, war and holocaust. Other famous visions have included those at Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina which have been ongoing since 1981. They are very much associated, for obvious reasons, with the Croatian community in that country. The Catholic Church has never unambiguously embraced any of the visions, though some Popes have. My Granny was always very ill after leaving Northern Ireland. She had asthma, and not the...

My Silly Lists There seems to have been a slight 'Mad Jose Biden-style' boomlet for my Nixon-inspired lists of things recently, which is quite flattering to me as I relax and waste time. So here is another one. It is, as usual, not exhaustive. States and Politicians that allow other legal systems or sovereignties within their soil or who promoted the idea 1. Margaret Thatcher during the Anglo-Irish Conference period, which allowed the Irish republic a say in the government of the North and which contemplated joint Garda-RUC police patrols on the street at one point. 2. Ronald Reagan when promoting Federalist principles and a pre-fourteenth amendment reading of state sovereignty and when dealing with the Indian Nations. 3. The United Kingdom (in the matter of Scots, Northern Irish, Manx, Jersey, Guernsey, and devolved body law as well as in the self-regulatory capacities of the City of London, the Temple, and elsewhere). Also, in a half dozen other ways. 4. The State of Texas wh...

Super Obama Girl Some of you may know that there is at present an electoral competition going on in the Arsenal of Democracy. The level of the campaign in the fourth New Rome is of the usual Ciceronian standard. Here is an instructional video of one of the voices of the American Democracy putting her case on political science. If my fiancee is reading this, she should pay attention to the Baudrillardian irony of the post-modern observation and not the thong & bra thing Super Obama Girl is wearing. Why, I only noticed it when another blog pointed it out.

Just a little nudge My friends Neil Clark and David Lindsay have recently been on fine form, and if you want to waste some time pleasantly, go and have a look at their websites. They have different views from myself and each other on very many things, but write well and are in the best traditions of the sort of English political traditions that I admire as an outsider. I'm a Catholic, a Labour member and of Irish extraction, but there are things about England, where I was born and where I have lived most of my life, that I like very much. Neil in particular has a great line on sports and comedy too, and is a really very successful journalist. You may have come across his articles, which are always fun, in any number of newspapers across the world. He has been hounded and stalked for his views by any number of 'cybertrolls' just lately. Their behaviour is about to chill blogland a little because it will almost certainly bring down the cyber-regulation laws, conceived to de...

What The Past Few Days Have Shown My philosopher friend Steve, who is also possessed of a very very good legal brain, likes to point out that the heart of the idea of political correctness is that words matter, and that changing what people say can change economic realities and thoughts. This sort of impulse is one that I am suspicious of. The past few days, however, have revealed to me a shocking level of proof for the problems that can arise when people do not know the terms they use or their implications. We have been subjected to ignorant lectures by public commentators about the 'unity of British law'. How many more hundreds of years of political Union on these islands have to pass before people just simply note that Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands have different legal systems> I have heard people limning the virtues of 'Civil Law'. They have that on the continent. We have contract, trusts, tort, equity, land, probate, employ...

Richard Nixon's Piano Concerto. I never met Richard Nixon, though there have been people on the alumni courses that I taught for the University of Chicago who knew him and who said that he was privately very charming, much more so than John Kerry. During his life, he was reviled by progressives, Democrats, and the upper classes as the ultimate scheming embodiment of the humourless middle class. In fact, in the 1960 election, the Scots-Irish Nixon had as good a claim to Irish ancestry as the Catholic Kennedy. It is one of the features of that unloved side of the Ulster community of peoples, however, that they do not radiate an exciting ethnic charm. They tend to be serious, literal, and very often painfully decent people, albeit of a very literal-minded sort. How could they ever have compared with riverdance? However, I remember the summer before I went to Oxford for four reasons. I had passed the Balliol entrance exam in a small vestry off the school chapel underneath a huge pictur...

Unofficial Courts in Britain I was all ready to join the debate on Rowan Williams' words at the Temple2008 lecture the other day, but so much hot air seems to have been generated I thought that I'd take a different direction. It really is very easy to stir up a witless half-informed debate in Britain, and always has been. It isn't the case that the controversy isn't enjoyable. I love watching a spot of wrestling. However, as I pointed out yesterday, the idea of the massive threat to 'British' legal identity formed by revolutionary shariah courts everywhere seems to have been formed from almost total paranoia mixed in with what I suspect are ready sharpened swords and quills. Nobody is looking properly at the basket of civil remedies that English people have available to them. 'Civil Law' as a term in this country plays into the hands of academics who want to pretend either that everything is all coherent and French, and halfwits who want to pretend that...

Shariah Law and England. I have only a few minutes before having to go to work, but everyone has become a legal expert after the Archbishop of Canterbury's lecture yesterday as part of the Temple 2008 series. I was teaching in Bath, so couldn't go, but I was interested to read that Dr Williams thought that 'Sharia law' in some aspects was compatible with 'Christian' law, and that some aspects should be adopted across the UK. I think that there are some points to make, though I'll write more later. Firstly, of course, there is no such thing as 'UK law'; there is law in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as associated systems of law in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. All differ quite widely in business matters, and in business it is quite common for contracts in Britain or indeed outside to specify that businesses want to be governed by 'English law' since it is more favourable to certain sorts of contract. It is...

Thomas Jefferson's War on Terror On of the things about American foreign policy is that it is at least consistent in its 'can-do' pursuit of victory. The tradition stretches back a long time. In 1801, for instance, President Jefferson deployed the new American navy into the Barbary War against the 'pirates' of North Africa, a loose confederation of states associated with Ottoman satraps, Deys and others that menaced the Mediterranean with fast ships. Winning an inconclusive victory in 1805, America returned ten years later and began the attacks that culminated in the final suppression of the Terror ships at the hands of an international coalition. As with many aspects of American history, of course, the true tale has an almost impossible resonance of science fiction. The story is an interesting one. For three hundred years, the Knights of Malta (an order of papal knights who still exist as a papal order and who have observer status at the UN) maintained a degree of...

What Britain was like in the 1970s Have a Monday Morning instructional video on the industrial life of Great Britain before the present regime took hold in 1979. TTFN!