The last bonus

We are repeatedly told that those who run banks and other great enterprises require to be paid enormously because their jobs are so tremendously demanding and those who can do them are so few. I suspect that there are actually quite a number of people who could do them, and the evidence suggests that both the CEOs and the star traders often fail to perform above chance and that they can commit egregious errors, even when warned of their possibility.

Yet to pay such individuals truly exceptional amounts of money helps create the impression, to the impressionable, that they are truly, almost Platonically, exceptional people. For the rest of us, to fall in with this view of the world and to give the idea that we are all to be placed into the positions for which we are pre-eminently fitted, there has been created the panoply of ever-expanding competitive formal qualifications. In education and training, as in the economy, ranking and rating supplant judgement. Such a system favours those who can operate it, either as candidates or providers (witness the recent fuss here about our now privatised secondary education examining boards training teachers how to get the best out of their systems), but, beneath it, privilege and favouritism persist.

This is the new 'world-class' status to which we must all aspire (or, in the case of many labourers in the vineyard, sink) lest we perish. The result, amongst the people generally, is to detroy the hope of good fortune (a necessary element of social content always), the belief in an accommodating society (it is no accident that it is in supposedly meritocratic societies that social mobility has declined), and the faith in the nation as a legitimate and effective expression of collective choice (as para-governmental international agencies and trans-national corporations increasingly dictate terms to states). Across Europe the extremist tendencies flex their muscles in dark and disreputable corners, and Molotov cocktails are a growth industry.

Trees and The Land

I thoroughly recommend The Land: an occasional magazine about land rights (rights here in the widest sense), whose current issue is devoted to trees and forests. Some articles can be found on their website, but for the bulk of it you need to pay £5, or, better still, support it with a modest £18 subscription for five issues.

I post a scan of the short editorial:

Those who might be impatient for a future issue on grass could meanwhile acquire a copy of Graham Harvey's The Forgiveness of Nature: the story of grass, which is also fascinating. All of his books repay reading.

Peace in our time

The European Community, and its earlier predecessor forms, was seen as the great institutional healer of European wounds and the preventer of a repetition of the armed conflict that had twice devastated the community of European nations in the course of the twentieth century, giving the world, amongst all the other benefits of European expansion the new acme of total war.

The evidence of this international, or increasingly (and by stealth) supra-national, enterprise was seen in the new political axis (one could dare to use the word, with all its ironic historical freight, deliberately) of Germany (originally West - there was a rival European resettlement under way for a while) and France, harmoniously united in political and economic self interest contre les autres. The lion indeed had laid down with the lamb - just don't ask which is which.

It was a convenient fig-leaf of history written by the victors (in different senses). There has been plenty of evidence that the old emnities and national resentments of Europe have not disappeared, even whilst new nation after new nation came knocking (and sometimes knock, knock, knocking) at 'old Europe's' door.

France and Germany may have been the twin historical geo-political rivals in Europe, but, despite all the passion, all the suffering, all the sorrow and the pity of three armed conflicts, it was not the French who had most suffered at, and loathed, the hands of the old Germans. (If they had, it might not have been such a prolonged and tortured process for France to come to terms with its relationship with Nazi Germany.) As Europe totters under the weight of international financial make-believe, we see that clearly now.

Is this the beginning of the end not just of Greece in the Euro-zone, not just of the Euro, but of the European 'Union'?

Other unions have perished in our time.

One thing is certain: it is not the end of 'old' Europe, with all its flaws and splendours. Perhaps we cannot have one without the other.

Behold

Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamd of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

On the face of it, the idea that the sins of the world can just be 'taken away' appears banal.

That the complication of the idea should lie in someone, at once 'the son of man' and 'the son of god', taking on responsibility for those sins beyond number and accepting a hideous physical punishment and death to 'redeem' mankind, past and future might seem to add a degree of repellancy and absurdity.

That all mankind should, from birth, not only be guilty of those sins, but unable by their own decisions or efforts to atone for them, might seem the final unacceptability to anyone of refined intelligence and sensibility.

Yet people whose intelligence and sensibility lead them in that direction also wish to appreciate directly within themselves the cultural significance of Salisbury Cathedral, Bach's St Matthew Passion or Byrd's Three Part Mass.

The Passion and the Mass unite sublime expressions of the most abstract of the arts with the most explicit and world-contaminated art of words. I do not think the two can be divorced in an understanding or valuation of those works. I do not mean that one necessarily has to accept, as the creators accepted, the beliefs that lie within them and largely motivated their authors, but unless one is prepared to value and enter into those beliefs in some meaningful sense, I think the appreciation must always remain shallow.

The art reveals a validity in something which, at an abstract level, appears unacceptable. I do not think one can say, how wonderful it is that something so beautiful and expressive can be constructed on the basis of something that is simply untrue or does not exist. The two cannot be separated.

So, whilst the question, Does God exist? seems to me to be worthy of the sixth-form debating society, I do not think a mere sense of 'wonder' at 'religious' art suffices to make one a sophisticated inheritor of our common culture. Not of course that the opposite necessarily applies.

Realities

The UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has warned of a new 'Cold War' and arms race in the middle east if Iran's nuclear ambitions are allowed to go unchecked. It is of course now conventional wisdom in some quarters that the real Cold War was a raging success, ensuring the peace of the world for decades and banrupting the evil empire, thus enabling western governments and business to lead the ex-Soviet peoples to the standards of democratic government and economic benefit that they now enjoy. But such advantages are not to be allowed to the lesser breeds: for them, Israel, the US and UK on on the verge of thinking a hot war would be preferable.

In the US a Moroccan man has been charged with attempting to carry out a suicide attack at the Washington Capitol. He had been under investigation for over a year by the FBI and supplied by them with a fake explosive vest. It would appear he had no more reliable source of supply.

The UK government has revealed that in 2009/10 it paid out £2 million in compensation and costs to 40 child asylum sekers wrongly detained in adult facilities. Under previous procedures a single immigration officer could decree the age of an undocumented minor.

The Chairman of RBS has defended the bank's chief executive, who recently declined an almost £1 million bonus but is about to receive £600,000 worth of shares arising from an earlier bonus award ("These were announced last year and endorsed by 99.2% of our shareholders"), by explaining that Mr Hester "is doing one of the hardest jobs in the world" - even harder, he almost said, than gaining asylum in this country as an unaccompanied Afghan minor, winning the Ubekistan presidential election with over 90 per cent of the vote, developing an Iranian nuclear bomb, or blowing up the US Congress. Mr Hester "is being paid at the low end of the range." Earlier Mr Hester had told journalists in his office that he had considered resigning after the fuss over his bonus but had decided that would be "too indulgent". "One doesn't need it. No one in this room, none of you – even if you're not on the same salary as me – no one is starving and by those standards one can't win this discussion."

Meanwhile, at the Sun, Rupert Murdoch has 'lifted the suspensions' of journalists who have been arrested but not charged. How high can you get?

Deft phrases

Lehman's was not thought to be 'too big to fail'. It was, after all, not particularly big. Our undoing lay in its interconnectedness. Now Greece is clearly seen as something of a minnow, but the world's leaders have learnt about 'contagion' and have been busily erecting 'firewalls'. Is our phraseology still smarter than our thought?

Firewall needed

The impression made by Greek fire on the west European Crusaders was such that the name was applied to any sort of incendiary weapon, including those used by Arabs, the Chinese, and the Mongols. These, however, were different mixtures and not the Byzantine formula, which was a closely guarded state secret whose composition has now been lost. As a result, to this day its ingredients remain a matter of much speculation and debate, with proposals including naphtha, quicklime, sulphur, and niter. Byzantine use of incendiary mixtures was also distinguished by their employment of pressurized siphons to project the liquid onto the enemy.

The language of Luxembourg

"Further technical work between Greece and the troika has led to the identification of the required additional consolidation measures of €325m and the establishment of a detailed list of prior actions together with a timeline."

Jean-Claude Juncker

No translation available.



Amost unbuttoned: Jean-Claude and friend. Did he talk in phrases like that with Mr Putin?

 Central banks across Europe have a collective nightmare. It is of the day Greece defaults on its debts, and the Aegean Sea is awash with small boats in which fleeing Greeks huddle with suitcases full of euros. Guards patrol the border in an attempt to prevent the flight of capital. Things get ugly and there are shootings, captured on film. Despite the best efforts of policymakers in Athens, Brussels and Frankfurt, it proves impossible to contain the panic, which spreads to Portugal and Ireland, the other two countries going through tough austerity programmes in return for bailouts from the EU and the IMF.

It is to forestall a Greek domino effect that the European Central Bank has flooded Europe's banks with cheap money over the past two months, easing funding concerns and bringing down interest rates on Spanish and Italian bonds.

A woman threatens to jump after her employer, the Labour Housing Organisation in Athens, was labelled for closure. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/EPA

"It's quite obvious studying their statements and their leaks," said a government source, referring to officials in Berlin, "that they are pushing for default. They want to get rid of Greece and then Portugal and create a smaller eurozone that will be closer to their interests. They start with leaks and then put them on the table as proposals."


"We're not going to play the proud Greek and do anything that would jeopardise our situation, but this latest leak that the program might be delayed until after elections made him [Venizelos] really angry," said the insider. "They say these things and then the markets react violently and then we've got another crisis. Every time we try to heal a little wound another one comes along."