GETTYThe European Central Bank is going to 'print' over a trillion euros to bolster the Eurozone
The neo-Communists won so the raging quarrel with those who control the Eurozone (the Germans actually) goes on.
A major problem is that the Greeks appear to be slightly mad.
They say “We are locked into the prison of the Eurozone” and that is perfectly true.
It has brought them close to national bankruptcy with almost half their people unemployed and debts to last the rest of this century.
Soon they will have to pay back a humungous debt in the form of the last bailout but have not the assets to do so, and must therefore ask for another bailout to pay back a portion of the last one.
Their reaction is: “We hate the prison.
"We hate the cells, the food, the warders.”
To which one might reply: “Well, actually the door is open.
"Why don’t you leave it?”
To which their reply is: “Oh, we don’t want to leave it.
"We just want it converted into a five-star hotel specially for us.”
I simply do not know the Greek for: “It don’t work like that, Stavros.”
Meanwhile the latest attempt to pump more formaldehyde into the still-walking cadaver of the pipe-dream of a single currency for 30 wildly differing economies (one day, 18 at the moment) goes on.
The European Central Bank is going to “print” a staggering £1.1 trillion euros to pretend it’s all working splendidly.
Well, no, actually it won’t.
Nothing will actually be printed.
This is virtual money, in real language pretend money.
Then the wizards are going to distribute 80 per cent of it through all the central national banks in the Eurozone so each can pretend they are prospering as the dole queues lengthen.
The national banks will get an allocation according to their economy size.
Well, bad luck Greece, again.
If they do not accept the austerity package that Frankfurt has decided for them, and they have sworn to refuse to do so, they get nothing.
You do not have to be a smart little boy to realise that it is bleeding cold out there and this emperor is stark naked.
So he is being offered a “virtual” warm overcoat.
But it is only virtual. How would the mandarins of Brussels and Frankfurt like it if we offered them virtual food for lunch and virtual champagne in their glasses?
Anyway, inventing all this virtual money will send the value of the euro plunging against the pound, giving us cheaper holidays in Europe but smaller exports to the Eurozone as they can less and less afford to buy our kit.
Meanwhile the Commonwealth is gagging to do more trade with us as is the non-Commonwealth rest-of-world.
What are we waiting for?
The answer is a few testicles on the bridge of SS Great Britain.
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One of the odd things about the late Leon Brittan is the complete volte-face he accomplished over the question of the European Union.
When he was a British minister (Home Office and Trade and Industry) he was pretty much an EU-sceptic.
Then he blew his career away by leaking an injudicious letter about Michael Heseltine to the media and had to resign.
Margaret Thatcher gave him a UK Commissionership in Brussels.
Within months he had “gone native” faster and more passionately than civil servants there could recall anyone else doing – although they almost all do it.
I only met him once – in Paris for a debate on that very subject at the UK Embassy.
Needless to say I was on the other side.
Up front he was courteous and affable but behind the veneer it was impossible to avoid the impression he regarded anyone sceptical of his new-found Utopia as a complete cretin.
As to the smears that have sullied his last years, we will probably never now learn more than what he said.
That the late Geoffrey Dickens MP came to him and deposited a fat file on his desk, supposedly with hair-raising details about paedophile perversions in some very high places indeed.
Without even opening the file he simply handed it over to senior mandarins and it has never been seen since.
They managed to “disappear it.”
He never even enquired after it.
His heart-of-Establishment fan club tells us now he had a brilliant intellect.
Odd. Great brains usually have a lively bump of curiosity.
In this case apparently not. If enquiry into this murky alleged episode is to continue it might be wise for the ferrets to look hard at the mandarins who took the file off him back then.
Of course, at the moment they can’t even find a chairman, let alone a complete enquiry.
But I’ll bet if the targets of the suspicions were brickies or cabbies there’d be a team of top investigators blazing away as you read these lines.
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Snobbery is a miserable creed but so is inverted snobbery as practised by Chris Bryant MP against singer James Blunt for having been to Harrow.
(Bryant went to Cheltenham – not exactly a horny-handed son of toil.)
But he missed the point.
Public schools are not churning out chinless drips any more because their headmasters know better than to take in chinless drips these days.
They know the score.
They teach their pupils to compete and compete hard.
The days of the languid wimp getting by on daddy’s title are long gone.
I very much doubt Master Bryant could ever fly an Apache helicopter gunship in combat.
But Prince Harry can.
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BBCDamian Lewis plays King Henry VIII in Wolf Hall
What a fuss about the use in the utterly magnificent Wolf Hall of candles only for illumination.
That said, there really was no need to use tallow candles instead of wax.
Tallow issues half the light of was.
If you are going the whole hog what about real wounds instead of false blood?
No need to go crazy, even for authenticity.
No need either to go to a level of lack of authenticity that makes a “thriller” both a joke and incomprehensible.
But that’s what they’ve done with Broadchurch.
I’m afraid I never fell (for the same reasons) for the first Broadchurch either.
OK, maybe I’m too pernickety.
But riveted by Wolf Hall which did not need any hysterics at all to achieve terrific tension.
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With King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia now gone and King Bhumibol of Thailand just 87, it looks as if Her Majesty at 88 is now the world’s oldest monarch.
And long may she live and reign yet.
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WIREIMAGEWhat is so wrong with Eugenie Bouchard posing?
There are some seriously humourless old bats around this country.
In Australia the lovely tennis player Eugenie Bouchard wins a match and a sports commentator asks: give us a twirl.
You’d think the sky had fallen in as the sex-war Gorgons got stuck in.
So what’s wrong with a pose?
Every family holiday involves a few.
Anyway on her way up the greasy pole of success Ms. Bouchard has posed for quite a few cameras.
And why not?
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There is a major misunderstanding at large in this country.
It is that the Chilcot Report has been delayed for years and will be for years yet to come because of the machinations of the incredibly powerful Tony Blair who may be indicted by what is in it.
Nice idea but Blair is not that powerful anymore; not by a long chalk.
Now I have no time for the fellow ever since I discovered that he had personally choreographed his Palm Sunday-style stroll up Downing Street on 2nd May 1997.
It seemed to me that a man who has just won a 175-seat majority in the House of Commons and still needs to be hailed like a risen Christ; and pretends the cheering crowd was spontaneous Londoners when they were ordered-to-attend Party staff, has a major vanity problem.
But this time, it is not his clandestine finger behind the Chilcot delays.
It is overlooked that much more powerful bureaucratic mandarins were also part of the secret rush to declare war on Iraq in 2003 and I believe they are also exposed in Chilcot.
Never under-estimate the power of the real rulers of this country, the Civil Service mandarins, i.e. the secret Establishment.
You doubt me? Think back. The Met.
Police and other forces across the country have been relentless in their pursuit of “historic” child-abuse cases and their perpetrators.
Hundreds have been unmasked, exposed, prosecuted and jailed.
But the one single sleeping scandal concerning and Establishment paedo-ring has gone absolutely nowhere.
The Home Secretary can’t even get a chairman in the post for 10 minutes before resignation.
Now it is shelved until further notice. And you really think that is a coincidence?
No, that is real power, the power to prevent, the power to cover up.
In both cases David Cameron is helpless.
Of course, he’s only the elected Prime Minister.
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