Mandy and the Lloyds/HBOS merger

Lloyds Action Now (LAN), an association of shareholders set up to recover their losses as a result of the merger of Lloyds with Halifax Bank of Scotland, has uncovered the "something" that always smelled to high heaven about the deal.

Seems Mandy, then Business Secretary, withheld evidence that could have changed the outcome of a vital court case in the run up to the merger. The evidence submitted to a Competition Appeals Tribunal in the Autumn of 2008 and later the Scottish Court of Session failed to mention the trifling matter that HBOS had been secretly funded to the tune of £25.4 billion in Emergency Liquidity Assistance.

"The evidence submitted by Lord Mandleson was the subject of a secrecy order which means that no-one who was a party to the case can reveal what it contained", said Adrian Lithgow, spokesman for LAN. "That does not prevent them from saying what was not in the secret dossier, and our sources are adamant there was no mention of the £25.4 billion. The implications are astounding".

Well, the fact that Mandy might have lied falls a long way short of astounding. More astonishing is that the perpetrators public servants involved did not get a super injunction to prevent all mention of the matter, as they can uniquely in Britain, where freedom of speech has been abolished along with national sovereignty, habeas corpus and all those other silly things people used to believe were their inalienable heritage.

The Libyan intervention: a hypothesis

So, you may be asking yourselves, WTF? Indeed, in the light of past experiences in Iraq and the current migraine of Afghanistan, WTFF? I propose the following, which - a first for Ockham's Razor - may err on the side of attributing long-term intelligent cunning to officials. The only reason I am persuaded it may be the case is because the French are involved and the Enarques are good at this sort of thing:

• Since the Franco-British Saint-Malo Agreement in December 1998, the only two European powers with the capability, the experience and the will to mount military interventions overseas have been looking for ways to harmonize their armed forces with an eye to joint operations.
• Although the EADS (Airbus) A400M debacle is one of the fruits of the new Entente Cordiale (which predates Saint-Malo), the more recent manifestation was the British decision to go ahead with building the French-designed CVF aircraft carriers without making provision for the aircraft that will fly off them and with the proviso that only one of them will be used by the Royal Navy.
• The deal seems to be that the aircraft carriers will be equipped with the French Rafale M, and that the French will operate the other carrier, something they need to do because the Charles De Gaulle is an embarrassing lemon. The Rafale for CVF trade-off may even be an outright quid pro quo.
• What the Entente Cordialers have needed is a conflict where French and British interests are sufficiently aligned to demonstrate that the whole is stronger than the parts. Libya fits the bill in spades.
• Both governments have shamelessly fellated Colonel Daffy in order to win privileged contracts for their respective oil companies. Those contracts (and commercial and diplomatic relations generally) are in the balance. Both Paris and London came off the fence early and have been very, very anxious to establish good relations with whoever takes over from Daffy.  
• Bombing the crap out of Daffy's Praetorian Guard is likely to win largish brownie points with the successor regime, meanwhile Special Forces are on the ground to try to make sure the winners are not the Islamofascists.

Then there is a sub-hypothesis that it is very much in the US interest that the Franco-Brits should at least assume the role of world policeman in their own back yard, which would explain why The One took a back seat in the negotiations leading up to the UN Resolution while preparing to take out Daffy's air defences so that the Yurrupeans could then go in and do the dirty work.

As I said at the beginning, I feel almost apologetic for suggesting that there has been joined-up thinking in this matter, but contrary to my natural inclination I think there may have been.

Change just one letter

Following from Archbishop Cranmer in "Ireland's New Puppet Government Emerges".

Politicians seem to win elections by promising heaven on earth, and when, a decade later, the electorate realises that they are still in purgatory, another swathe of disaffected voters views the democratic process with cynicism and disdain, declaring a plague on all their houses. This leads to voter apathy and alienation, a deterioration in democratic participation and a declining turnout in elections, especially among the young.

If our democratic leaders do not wake up soon to the inevitable consequences of this, then Tripoli and Cairo will come to Dublin, Lisbon and London, just as it has already come to Athens. You can’t buck the people.

To the contrary: you can buck some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and most of them come back for more. Maybe the Irish should build a colossus astride the Liffey to match the one I propose for the Thames, symbolizing the Greatness of Modern Britain: a fat, balding man with his back to the North Sea, bent over with trousers around his ankles to reveal vestigial testicles and the bold caption:

BUCK ME (IF IT'S NOT TOO MUCH BOTHER) - I LIKE IT

Another one bites the dust

Never held much of a brief for Devil's Kitchen/Knife, and his last post simply confirms why.

I simply cannot bring myself to comment on the crap that is going on around us; I want to concentrate on making enough money to ensure that myself (sic) and my wife can, at the last, escape all of this shit. When the end of our great liberal civilisation finally comes, we can leave the stinking socialist hellhole that Britain is fast becoming.

Once I would have wished to take everyone with me, but the people of this country have shown that they don't care about freedom, they don't care about liberty - they would rather have their cotton wool prison. So now my considered opinion is, "you wanted this - you can go fuck yourselves."

Those are words to write when you leave, not before. I am also sad that the British people have so little respect for their heritage, but I understand how it happened and find it hard to condemn. Societies, like people, get old and tired. Exasperating as it is to see them slip into dotage, there must remain respect for what they achieved while still vigorous. Few achieved as much and none more than this one.

With grovelling apologies to my sons for the shit-heap my generation landed them in, I hope to continue trying to win back minds polluted by decades of hateful leftist propaganda so that my grandchildren may enjoy a fuller life. I would cheerfully die for them, so blogging is just a small payment on account.

Thirteen worse than wasted years

Ian Duncan-Smith's wholesale reform of the welfare system, Gove's first step in the reform of the educational system and now Vince Cable's trailing of a "very radical" reform of the state pension system - all of these could have been, and should have been carried out by the Blair government. There is not one thing about the new policies that Blair did not identify as "progressive" alternatives to a dysfunctional status quo.

So why, possessed of a repeated electoral mandate such as few prime ministers have ever enjoyed, did he not carry them out? Because he lacked the courage to get rid of the malevolent Gordon Brown, who sabotaged every such initiative, and inflicted him on the nation when he departed to cash in his international IOUs.

If posterity even bothers to do so, it may record - as the Massachusetts polemicist Sam Adams predicted it would in 1772 - that 1997-2010 marked the point of no return in Britain's journey to "obscurity and contempt".

SDSR - as others see us

Here's a jaw-dropper. Headline from the the respected US mag Foreign Policy:

Why the U.S. needs to be more like Britain

What makes it all the more remarkable is that the author's focus is entirely on defence, the most cocked-up part of the spending review. If in the opinion of a well-informed US journopuke the Americans have much to learn from Liam Fox and the "British defense establishment", then they are many, many miles up shit creek.

Britain's reductions are substantial, and one wishes they had not been necessary. But the Cameron government deserves an awful lot of credit for facing Britain's debt crisis and making hard choices that accept risk in the near term to put their country on stronger strategic footing. The British set sensible priorities and programmed to them, making cuts that do not damage their ability to protect and advance their interests. Lots of other countries are set to make reductions in defense spending, including the United States; probably none - including us - will do as proficient a job as Defense Minister Liam Fox and the British defense establishment have done.