Laughing at the present/Thinking about the future

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black hats

Jacques le Canif

One-time French president Chirac's lawyer told newsmen last week that old Jacques the knife had been 'placed under formal investigation' as part of a probe into the improper use of city funds when he was mayor of Paris.

Eschewing the subtle route on behalf of his client, the legal Eagle Jean Veil commented:

"Mr Chirac has been placed under judicial investigation for misappropriation of public funds, as several other people have already been in this case". Hmm....so, Jacky knows these folks perhaps? Je pense que nous pourrions informes.

Kieran Fallon

Oil Companies

Once again, every narrow financial observer and naive woman's favourite to be leading the charge as White Charger Knight in Charge of Saving National Prestige is the one and ghastly Richard Branson. Now that Northern Hock is worth two and a half p, the sweet and sour of Branson pickle wants to flavour the appallingly bitter pill of a £23 billion taxpayer write-off - while charging all of us a fortune for doing so.

Maybe he will have his wicked way, and maybe he won't. But I think we should examine the career of this South Sea Bubble-gum hero rather more closely before we all get too enthusiastic.

Branson began life as an anti-big-business 'cut out the leeches' supplier of discounted vinyl. Himself the son of a successful middle class professional (and product of a good public school) his one minor mistake at this stage was evading VAT on sales. During a saga that still ranks as a major mystery thirty-five years on, Dicky managed to avoid porridge and - following a payback deal - went on to become the man we all know, and some people love.

Way back in the go-go-go 1980s, the Branson Boy hired boutique ad agency Michael Bungey & Partners to advertise Virgin Records. Virgin (at this time still a cowboy outfit) ran up huge media-purchasing debts with Bungey, and then chose to question the subsequent bills on any level and at every turn - in short, anything but cough up. Bungeys ran into a hole-in-balance-sheet crisis, and wound up being bought (spookily, also for two and a half p) by Charlie & Maurice Saatchi. Freed from this irksome debt, Richard Branson went from strength to strength.

Despite his image of derring-do (and to be fair, it's richly deserved) Branson has always been a chancer. Sure enough, he takes on the big boys: but only because he understands the way they think and work so well. He is not above using the same ploys himself. Those who have been employed by Virgin Money in the past would be only too pleased to tell you that Sir Richard's selling tactics are up there with the worst of them.

One has to admire his command of public relations. Following the derailment of a Virgin train during 2006, he was quick to stress that his only concern was to help those traumatised by the event. Equally swift, however, was his insistence that Virgin was not responsible for rail upkeep. He was correct on both counts.....but just a little too fast out of the blocks for comfort.

Remember only this if you contest my belief that Branson wears the Black Hat: not one of his 'rescue deals' and White Knight dramas has ever involved The Clean One in expenditure of his own money, or losses on the profit line. For all his professed philanthropic Hippie-cum-alternative-cum-rock music values, he is a hard, self-promoting self-made billionaire - and don't ever let yourself forget that.

Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006)

...and the same to you, Milt

It's a mistake to imagine that everyone in the black fedora is a thoroughly nasty piece of work; quite often, such headgear adorns the brain of very bright people who are nevertheless suffering from three associated Black-Hat infections: evangelism, selfishness and naivity. (One of our subject's most devoted disciples, Baroness Thatcher, suffered from precisely the same illness - her ghastly son Mark is one of the more pernicious results).

Go to 99% of sites about Milt, and he comes across as the love-child of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie: pioneer, Nobel Prizewinner, financial genius, God, saint and all-round bombproof hero. But it's remarkable how frequently - if one follows up a few site-links - they tend to lead back to either The Man Himself, or some foundation for whom he did a lot of the giving and founding thing.

Of course, he does seem to have given a lot of dollars away, but an awful lot of them went into The Milton Friedman TV Hour or The Milton Friedman Chair or The Milton Friedman Billionaire's Benevolent Society. And most of those from which Mr Friedman wasn't actually earning an income carry disturbing names like Truth, Liberty Now, End the Lies and other stirring battle-cries of the US far Right. I can't work up the enthusiasm to go through all two million sites devoted to our best-ever economist, but as yet there's no sign of The Milton Friedman Other Guy's Point of View League.

I accept that, without evangelists like Milton Friedman, it's quite possible creeping Statism of the Old Labour variety would've rendered Britain bankrupt by 1985 at the latest. But on the whole, I doubt it: by 1979, there were enough of us ready to hold our noses and vote for The Mad Handbag, if only because Trade Unions had made it impossible to go to a movie, catch a bus, take the Tube or even get buried.

What we should ask ourselves, however, is whether swopping Economic Statism + mediocrity for Anti-libertarian Statism + greed was that good a trade. Like it or not, the State here in the UK is infinitely more invasive of our privacy in hip-hop deregulated 2007 than anything dearly departed, disorganised, incompetent Old Labour could ever have organised.

The truth is (if we examine the record) that the MF in IMF had an ego the size of Chile, and almost everything he asserted has proved to be arrant tosh. Here's a good starter for ten:

'It is the job of the corporate executive to make as much money as possible for the shareholders'

By the end of the radical free-market period, both poverty and inequality had increased significantly. In terms of income distribution, the share of the national income going to the poorest 50% of the population declined from 20.4 to 16.8%, while the share going to the richest 10% rose dramatically from 36.5 to 46.8%.

Now it's true that Chile is just one South American banana republic. But the total GNP and wealth-creation data for both Thatcherite monetarism and Reaganomics tell precisely the same story: higher growth alongside narrowing inequality from 1950 - 75, and the opposite from 1975 to the present day.

So I'm afraid Milton Friedman has to join the black-hat team - not least because his continuing and insidious influence is being masterminded by proxy from the grave. Given his love for the unrestrained prophet motive, we can hardly be surprised.

Somewhere between Milton Friedman and John Meynard Keynes, there has to be a happy medium. If only it were Milton Keynes.

 

The privileged world of Keith Vaz

Keith Vaz MP has a voting record as follows:

* Strongly in favour of smoking ban, ID cards, student top-up fees, the Iraq War, Gay Rights and banning fox hunting.

* Strongly against a more transparent Parliament, and enquiries into the causes and conduct of the Iraq War.

Perhaps one reason why Keef doesn't want a more transparent Parliament is that his intervention on behalf of the Hinduja brothers was obviously corrupt.

The Guardian describes him as 'an ideological weathervane, always ready to track the wind. In a decade he has crossed the political spectrum of his party, from membership of the hard-left Campaign group to ultra loyalism to New Labour.'

Early in his Commons career he called for Salman Rushdie's novel, Satanic Verses, to be withdrawn.

He was an outspoken advocate of "black sections" within the Labour party. Clearly, Vaz is a man who believes in discrimination that's positive in his favour.

In 2002, the Commons standards and privileges committee found Mr Vaz committed serious breaches of the MPs' code of conduct and showed contempt for the House of Commons. As a result of this, he was suspended.

Derry Irvine found him 'amazing' as a pps. But we all know about Derry Irvine.

Now, right up to date, An investigation by BBC Radio's Today programme has unearthed evidence that Vaz did not disclose all his property interests to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Elizabeth Filkin, during her investigation into his affairs. As Andrew Hosken reports, he told Mrs Filkin that he owned three properties when documents show that at the time he owned four.

Further, he transferred the ownership of a fifth property to his mother, just eight days after he was asked for details of all the properties owned by him.

Poppy fields

Afghanistan was not winnable by the British Empire at the height of its supremacy. It was not winnable by Darius or Alexander, by Shah, Tsar or Great Moghul. It could not be subdued by 240,000 Soviet troops. But we're being told Afghanistan is winnable....and maybe we need to take a stand somewhere against the loopy folks.

In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards.

The huge productivity rise is in one field of activity: this year will see the biggest harvest of opium in Afghani history- in fact, by far the biggest opium crop in the world.

As we're supposed to be winning down there, why don't we do everyone a favour and burn the whole lot?

(Answer: Money, dummy)

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