At least, if not immediately, unavoidably. The BA crews think they have a Divine Right to work: wakey-wakey, so did the London dockers in the 1970s. Fourteen years ago, I paid BA for three firstclass seats on a shorthaul run, one for my two-year-old daughter. Did we get three seats? No. Two plus a lap-strap, next to the most overweight businessman imaginable: in effect, we got one-and-a-half seats. That has never been forgotten. Similarly, something like a million passengers see their Christmases in ruins. Good riddence to B.A.d rubbish, who have abused the image of the UK for far too long.

In her valedictory before Xmas yesterday, la Harman confessed to wishing to be Billy Joel's Uptown Girl. Joel wrote that song about his then wife, the model Christie Brinkley, and the resemblance to Joel's words bears consideration:
She's been living in her white bread world
She's getting tired of her high class toys
And all her presents from her uptown boys...
Well, that's the deputy leader of the House in never-never land then
Not to mention her boss, who seems to have discarded the serious economic advice of the Treasury in the PBR for his own version of Walter Mittydom. The psychological term for this is fugue, going into a catatonic state because he cannot face reality. The refusal to hold an election, the claim to be in a position of strength, the failure to address the crying state of the nation's finances, all point in the same direction. One hates to admit it, but Blair was right, the only reason for him to have stepped down was to make way for an even bigger disaster who would make TB look good in comparison.
It's a bit like someone living off their credit card: the interest will kill you, and the sooner you stop the better. My concern is that the failure to do so changes the long-term interest hit from debilitating, as per the current situation, to wipe-out: the UK may never be able to recover if this waits until May/June. 50 days (Budget preparatory) from the last General Election date is technically 23rd July, but that runs into the Summer Recess, so it could be October, another ten months before we get a Budget.
That being said, however, Rahere observes that one of the more reliable indicators of intended activity is the Parliamentary Recesses Calendar, which includes the Half-Term break 10-22.2 but nothing thereafter. That really means they expect to be dissolved by Easter, which falls at the start of April with the Recess starting on 21.3, and, given the 17 working days between Dissolution of Parliament (as if this lot were not already dissolute enough) plus three weeks recess, we're now talking a Spring Election, between mid-April and early May - a double-check shows the Whitsun Recess should be from 9.5, so presumeably before that. It's then just possible to fit in the Budget at the end of June. Still, another six months in this kind of chaos is ridiculous, and the justification for it looks so weak any serious rating agency should downgrade the UK to AA without further ado.

Now that nobody has found anything worth mentioning about the PBR, other than the dog which didn't bark cause it was on Mars (ie the recession being at the top end even of Rahere's figures, yet the Chancellor claims to be working from a position of strength), we obviously face a Mikawber scenario, where HMG bumbles along hoping something will turn up, blissfully ignorant of the probability that it will be a nasty surprise from someone who does not exactly align themselves with his hopes (like Mandy).
If ever there was cause to get Al-Quaida's hopes up, it was yesterday's presentation. When one adds in GB's epic, indeed mythological, inclusion of Spain in the G20 in a desperate last-ditch denial that the UK is the only G20 country still in recession, one can only conclude that this bunch are now truly away with the fairies and not living in the real world at all. All Al-Q now have to do is outlive them politically.
Admittedly, budgeting is nigh-on impossible when you don't know what the interest hit will be, either in terms of phasing or in terms of rating (junk-status here we come) and the consequential effect on margins (interest at 10% anyone?). I'd hate to be the next Chancellor now.
A government which clings to power simply for the joy of keeping anyone with real management skills out of position can only be doing so in order to fill their sporrans. That is a disaster waiting to be revealed. In the mean time, the Banks get away Scot-free, just don't pay any bonuses. As they were, and are, responsible for this, the last real opportunity to visit the damage back where it belongs - namely, 1.9 trillion debt in the next three years, roughly equal to an entire year's GDP - has gone begging. Permit Rahere to suggest we can make huge savings by dismissing HM Revenue & Customs, including the Treasury, by redesigning the tax form for 2012:
How much do you earn?
Send it.

With one bound the Chancellor was free, particularly aided by the Divinity from the Machine. Or in other words, the PBR shows he ain't got a clue (working from a position of strength, he claims) - by some magic an economy shrinking at 4.75% (in practical terms a real 5.9%) will start to grow by 1-1.5% inside of a couple of months. Yet all his circumstantial data shows this ain't so, supporting the unemployed without finding them jobs, cutting into the Public Sector, particularly by cutting out the crap. Watch the Public Sector start sabotaging him as he hits their pensions, about the one thing they had going for them - money put aside for Afghanistan will be destroyed by the Whitehall Taliban.
Looking at the haggis next to him, HMG has obviously given up the ghost on survival, so it's immaterial whether this balances or not, the entire exercise is a waste of time and the incoming government of whatever form will have to start from scratch.
Gorgeous George's reply was reasonable, but VC down the end raised the real points: he's suggesting splitting up the banks. ABOUT BLOODY TIME TOO. However, he also points out the unbelievability of the statistics, and asks what is the chance of a double-dip recession. Permit Rahere to reply, none, because it presumes we've pulled out of it in the first place. As we haven't, it won't.

Rahere was just watching Robert Hughes' The Mona Lisa Curse on More4, at the same time listening to Radio 4's Archive Hour on the Turner Prize Turnaround, which both hypothesise the néant of modern art, its nihilism in its adoption of capitalism, yet neither had the courage to point out that the truth of the matter is that the capital value of these works is yet another giant bubble. Rahere's been deeply involved in van Eyck's Founatain of Life, and his Mystic Lamb, a pairing delivering the Papal message that the Church Rules OK - as it did in the 1430s when they were presented. The implicit repositioning of the Papacy as superior to monarchy led to the Renaissance, it knocked monarchy down a peg or two and put them within reach of the nobility, causing the Wars of the Roses, a massive extension to the Hundred Years War, which in turn triggered the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and its idea of the Divine Right of Kings, whence the 30 Years War and English Civil War, and the rise of the Enlightenment. I challenge Tracy Emin to change the course of world history like that - and I speak from a position of authority having done so.
The point is that still nothing changes. The Directors of RBS threaten to go elsewhere - with their CVs, good luck to 'em, but of course, that particular bluff has already been called. These are the same idiots who invest in that art-of-parts, where the only parallel is that if you have to ask the price you can't afford it, in parallel with the semantic question that if you have to ask the meaning of modern art, you don't understand it, which is a nullity of a response given that the artist invariably responds with the question what does it say to you? This is subjectivity of the shallowest order, and a mind so shallow as to invest in it is a mind too shallow to comprehend that the King as no clothes, in general, and that the assessment of market risk is beyond their intellectual capacity in particular.
And at this time of war and depression, when the arts should be flourishing, they are not, because of the commercial deadweight on them. Perhaps its time for us to revalue all our values, as all we're doing is replacing one con with another - and that includes our politicians as well.

The Commissars are moving in - or at least, the FSA is now a dead dog given the ECB's setting up the European Systemic Risk Board in London, to put an end to the shennanigans. Darling's one hope now is a painless release come the election - he won't be holding the baby when things start to go down the swanee. Well, the Banks were warned, not least by yours truly: by not cleaning up their act, they face the legists of Brussels, a fate to be wished on no human being. But then again, human beings they ain't, so good luck to them - because they won't be allowed to deal with Europe if they keep on the current tack. At all.
Given that the EU Foreign Policy is now being run by an unelected Common Purpose follower, Baroness Ashton, Rahere is concerned for the future - and it's not as if it were just her, her hubby Peter Kellner is one of CP's front men. Some of the more extreme bodies out there are taking the old German joke, that Parliament ultimately only has one option, to dissolve the electorate, rather seriously - at least one paper I've seen researching Coverdale +"Common Purpose" refers to research papers discussing some such plans.

The FT Brussels blog suggests there is no common ground whatsoever now between UK and European politics - for example, that Boy David won't be allowed to put a stop to things now. At the end of the day, this justifies the realpolitik of UKIP - and the more rabid headlines seen yesterday. As there's now no point in voting Conservatiuve either, as they're obviously as useless as GB's bunch, Rahere shudders at the thoughts of what happens next, presumably some form of UK Karzai dictatorship justified by a homegrown terrorist force, the nature of which is bound to cause tension on the streets of Oldham and Bradford, whichever side it's from.
Given that the UK statistics aren't worth a damn, that the so-called recovery of a couple of months back was at best a dead cat bounce and in truth rather closer to the likelihood of success of a clean-up of Parliament than the first shoots of spring claimed by OMG - hdd toat, my PC just started swapping h and o...

Rahere, as some of you may know, has been working in aspects of the roots of science. That, in plain language, means he's been trying to set out some waypoints in the non-esoteric history of alchemy, way back before the usual 1600 at which point the historians of hard science cop out: - in the sense that although this was not exactly the science of chemistry as we know it, none the less there was an acquis of biochemistry, often inherited from tradition and arabic sources,
To whatever degree this week's conflict between Alan Johnson and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs may be the fruit of personal animosities, ambitions and arrogance, there remains at core a dispute between realpolitik and technocracy which is a perfect repetition of the original 1105 Abelard debate. And yet de Champeaux' Nominalist, Realist, pragmatic creed survived down the years to become Realpolitik through the helpful intermediaries of Richelieu, himself a dabbler in these subjects, and the
As part of this, Rahere's found proof according to our modern standards of his more extravagant claim, in a framework which shows Rome was singing from a consistent songbook between 1105 and 1600, five hundred years (half of our effective civilisation) without change when the rest of the surrounding doctrine, indeed of civilisation, changed remarkably. This millennial creed was only driven underground by the rise of middle-class power initially in the Counter-Reformation, followed by the Thirty Years War and War of the Spanish Succession, followed by the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and capped off firstly by the century of revolutions in Europe and the First World War's extinction of the aristocratic dinosaur. Even during that time, Rome has continued in its policy, but often by routes which are to say the least ambiguous in their morality: to find one of the chief promoters of Ruusbroec's theories, Evelyn Underhill, alongside the satanist Aleister Crowley in the Golden Dawn, and to find that certain Popes were members of AA, alongside Crowley, gives rationality to the Catholic history of child abuse. And you know about Dunblane.

Well, if the Guardian can't say, its friends can review the questions asked and see if any cap fits.
Such as:
Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon): To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, what matters were discussd at the meeting between the Secretary of State and Charlie Whelan on 29 January 2009.

Rahere enjoys the Ig Nobel Prizes, and this year's are a bumper crop, particularly for economists. Whether Gideon Gono or the four Icelandic bankers, there is much for us to ponder in this resurgent bubble.
However, there is a new low for graft in London which should rank on that Order. Saturday night, you had to pay a quid to charity to get in to most clubs. Of that, a third went to the Police Cadets. If the cops want to recruit, let them do so honestly, not by making a compulsory levy. There's absolutely no distance at all between that and forcing the population to cough up for them to do their habitual dossing. Oops, that's called Council Tax. Bois, how come you let them get away with that? You're fast enough on Europe, which isn't your responsibility for all that you're a former Eurobrat (a student of the European School, Uccle, to be precise, founded to educate the children of Eurocrats), but running your own show correctly? It isn't as if this is a new organisation, it was set up five years ago, so why the sudden call for funding?

Remember those promises made by our beloved MPs back in June to reform their ways? Anyone watch Dispatches - MPs, Trains and Gravy Trains to discover what they've been up to during the longest summer break of recent times? They had their pinkies crossed. And they didn't even look at who stayed in Corfu - or better yet, Sochi.
So how can Mandy turn round and gloat repulsively to the Labour Conference, "I Came Back - and you can too" when he has no democratic mandate?  Surely he doesn't mean we can be ruled by an unaccountable bunch of crooks, can he? Or perhaps that's the truth of the last ten years.

Recall: the question of Iraq was whether the Americans go left to Syria or right into Iran. Left was a deadend: the very threat of it was a sufficient sword of Damocles to calm the Syrian provocation of Israel. The other option is jam in the sandwich between Iraq and Afghanistan, and doing so without a major reinforcement will simply be striking a fuse to a old-fashioned Islamic Jehad. Iran's second nuclear facility is bunkered, in other words not an evident civil facility, and the generalised acceptance in the Security Council of the situation provides sufficient legal foundation for a self-defence argument for any such currently hypothetical aggression.
What is the likely scenario? The world postures a blockade, and excepting that blockade runners Iraqi-style make a significant difference, shortage of refined fuel causes economic hardship - trucks don't run on nuclear power. The Iraqis respond according to their track record, aggressively, which probably means a nuclear attack on Israel, possibly delivered either by camel or container. Their motivation will be a call to resume the Califate, and so we should expect an interim escalation on that track between now and then.
Another factor is that both Iran and Russia are diplomatically compromised by that S-300 shipment. Whether Putin knew of it or not is immaterial: the harm to the Russian reputation is absolute, both as an arms supplier and as a State. The only remaining question is the extent to which the actual seller - putatively the Military, KGB, mafia, a regional government, the manufacturer or some combination of the lot -  was working independantly of the State. If it was, then the possiblity of future chaos is infinite.

What is economics? Modelling business and finance? Or modelling the world? The world's full of people each expressing their independant take on Maslow's heirarchy of needs and aspirations, and trading off the ego with their (or their spouses) social conscience. Simply modelling GNP puts all the focus on short-term profits, and moves none on the progression of the population up the heirarchy - this was an aspect of the crash, that such questions were disregarded. Indeed, there's a Nobel Prize for the person who finds another level above altruism: but we're really rather more oriented towards less highfalutin' goals, towards lifting the third world onto the first step without pulling the second world backwards. Can it be done? Perhaps, but not according to the classic industrial model of production causing waste: we need to review our industrial processses, and indeed our aspirations, to ensure the polluter really pays. This is a start in linking G20 and the imminent Chinese announcement on the environment: the question now will be to gag the Republicans so the US Government can really start to govern.

Twice in recent years, Rahere has had to sort out from a distance the problems caused by British Gas and cohorts using unqualified fitters. One was replacing a meter, and was unqualified to purge the system as required to be capable of by Law: Centrica tried every which way to shift the blame, and ultimately failed. Then again, they refused to support a back-boiler system, insisting on replacing it with one which would pump carbon monoxide straight into a bedroom window. They failed to consider an exclusion in the Law, allowing the replacement of one system with another, and were guilty of misselling.
In both instances, they used people lacking the necessary qualifications to do the job, a problem compounded by the existance of over 100 different CORGI qualifications, not all of which were suitable for any job. Overkill, in a word: but even Health and Safety didn't want to know, despite the very real result that in both instances an elderly person could have lost all heat for a week. One of the cases involved a fitter now sent down for three years for manslaughter: Rahere considers the HSE have a lot to answer for, not least be creating a similar cosy coterie of industry insiders in their surveillance teams as we see in the BBC Trust and in the FSA.
And so, are we really to believe that the new GasSafe body will be the bees knees? I doubt it, given that it's run by the same body behind TVLicensing, Capita.Strange how one dubious body replaces another, isn't it? One must conclude that the people doing the replacing are equally corrupt.

A couple of years ago, the BBC Governors were replaced by a supposedly independant Trust which was intended to provide autonomous surveillance of the operation of the BBC. Ben Bradshaw has at long last woken up to the fact it replaced one bunch of sycophants with another.
The Lobby Group broke away from Bob Peston's blog after it became clear that free thinking was not permitted on the blog. Alexander Curzon has just been banned for similar reasons, and Rahere refuses to deal with it because his complaints went unanswered at all levels, including the Trust - he had to resort to blatant insult to cancel his UID, which is ridiculous. It evidently behoves the Group to write to Burnham en masse to support the proposition to replace the Trust members.
The problem is compounded by the disprtoportionate influence of Common Purpose within the BBC. This body, which has many of the hallmarks of a religious sect, brainwashing its members and harrying dissidents, has betrayed its social entitlement and must be extirpated.
The management of a £3.5bn organisation is a problem, Rahere admits - one can hardly entrust it to a group of housewives and white van men. However, those are exactly the kind of citizens who should have the ultimate say, and not the hand-picked great and good supposedly representing the regions. Rahere certainly had never heard of the rep in his region before apppointment, nor from her either after. The answer, in Rahere's opinion, is to expose the senior management of the BBC to public accountability, and to replace the Trust with housewives.
A key aspect in Bradshaw's beef is the TV Licensing fee, and in particular the Trust's reaction to part of it being used to pay for something non-BBC, namely the rollout of digital broadcasting. It now seems they intend extending it to the Internet as a whole - Rahere has had a document addressed to all students saying in effect that if you have a PC, then you must licence it. That is very contrary to the original intention of the Act by which it is effected, which is "An Act to confer functions on the Office of Communications; to make provision about the regulation of the provision of electronic communications networks and services and of the use of the electro-magnetic spectrum; to make provision about the regulation of broadcasting and of the provision of television and radio services; to make provision about mergers involving newspaper and other media enterprises and, in that connection, to amend the Enterprise Act 2002; and for connected purposes." And that does not include witch-hunting the entire ruddy Internet. Nor does it permit them to license sites, which have no legal entity, but people, who do: they represent that a student owning a property and living on campus has to license both sepaarately. That is nonsense, and abusive, and despicable. Their entire hectoring and narrow-sighted approach just makes Rahere feel the entire thing is unfair to the Independant TV sector, an abusive governmental subsidy under the EU Competition Directives, and in urgent need of reform.

Thank you, Mr President. Rahere's thinking seems to have been adopted by the French as essentail G20 homework, and so Rahere is supplying the links to the Amartya Sen Lecture Series in Sustainable Development. It is to be noted that the Chairman of the Steering Commitee was recently coopted by the UN. Rahere was hosting the support staff last night.

The future of the EU's Lisbon Treaty stands on the result of the Irish referendum on 4th October, and is part of the biggest spin in history: like the Americans reminded they must "hang together or be hanged separately", the Commission has decided everything will be done to force it through.
However, the referendum faces a problem: the great alienation between the Irish government and people, who are about as hated as Labour are in the UK. The last referendum, it was considered, was lost for reasons other than the subject at hand, and Rahere's own poll suggests a much closer figure than the 30% Yes majority spun by the Commission: many people blame Europe for being a fickle friend, supporting them for a while then suddenly pulling the plug: they've been left with hundreds of white elephants, as the government spent the EU aid on office buildings which have never been occupied, rather than addressing fundamental problems.
However, functionally there has been no campaigning until now, a mere three weeks before the vote: the EU produces a set of heavily biased statements, omitting things like the likelihood that if the people of Europe had actually been given a voice, no less than 15 nations would be in the Irish situation, and that the German Supreme Court has found a fundamental conflict between the Sovereignity powers being abrogated by the Commission and their National Constitution - the Commission answers that they are equal powers, but the Court is bound to answer that sovereignity cannot be equal. This reveals the Treaty's fundamental weakness, that it's been drafted appallingly weakly in legal terms - it will, for instance, leave Europe unable to defend itself legally. Great!
The result of the Irish Government bowing to the Commission's impulsion was immediate: it gave Declan Ganley an excuse to reactivate the No campaign, and a target for the population to vent their spleen on the Government. suddenly, I think that cause may be lost.

A similar instance is the Government's need to bite on the economic bullet. Public spending must be cut: but it must continue to pay its way out of the recession. It wants to kill Trident, perhaps: if so, we end up behind the Iranians as a nuclear power, and as a world power, somewhere in the fourth world, dependant for example on Libyan patronage in the Fletcher case. But the Libyans aren't the only ones with a firm grip on the Scottish sporran: the banks and heads of industry continue to take huge chunks out of their businesses. They create all kinds of justification, but at the end of the day, it's just unmitigated anti-social greed. Perhaps we should allow them to do so, and suddenly tax them retrospectively - at least if they go it'll clear the way for people with some fresh ideas, and spread the jam around a bit thinner. They remind me of nobody quite so much as Lord Manchester in the 1640s, stoking a revolution by their insatiable lust for dosh. A similar thing happened in France in the 1780s: perhaps we'll eventually clear out the entire pest-house if the next lot are as bad.

A few days back, I suppressed my comments on the peculiar events surrounding the hunt for the Arctic Sea. Originally reaching the news on 12th August, it was initially reported as sailing between Jacobstad in Finland and Bejaia in Algeria a cargo of timber. On 24th July, a group of masked men boarded it off Gotland on the east coast of Sweden, claiming to be anti-drugs police, and left after damaging its communications equipment. The Russian crew must have fixed it, because they secured passage through the Straights of Dover on 28th July. It was last heard of off Brest at 0130 BST on 30th and then disappeared - the next thing anyone knew was two Russian nuclear subs and three surface ships were beating up the Atlantic frantically looking for it, which made the headlines on 12th August, on the orders of President Medvedev who ordered the entire Russian navy into the hunt, according to TASS, an extraordinary measure for a cargo worth a mere million. It is not impossible that the entire seaworthy Russian navy indeed took part in the hunt - how are the mighty fallen!
On the 15th, reports from French and Portuguese coastguards suggested it was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, and on 16th a Russian Speznatz unit recaptured it, arresting the Russian crew (the ship itself is registered by its Russian owners under a flag of convenience in Malta). Things the seemed to go quiet for until 3rd September, when we suddenly learned the editor of SovFracht, an online trade journal, had fled Moscow under threat from the FSB, the heirs to the KGB, after he revealed a suspicion the ship was carrying a significant weapons system. Previously to loading its cargo of timber in finland, it had undergone repairs in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and it is suggested that that was when the arms were loaded.
Further research showed the Iranians had agreed the purchase of an S300 ground-to-air system from Russia in 2007. The Russians had dragged their feet delivering, but in April the Iranians were optmistic their order would soon be met. On 18th August, the Israeli President Shimon Peres received a commitment from Medvedev that it would not.  On 28th August, a Pakistani court lifted the travel restrictions on Dr AQ Khan, the maverick nuclear weapons designer who sold the bomb to North Korea, but they were reimposed by the High Court on 2nd September. We now learn Iran has enough fissile material for a bomb, and that Israel was behind the incident - one pities Medvedev, given the way he was forced to buckle before the Israeli pressure on 18th.
Why? In 1981, 2 Israeli phantoms destroyed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in a preemptive strike when faced with a possible nuclear threat, and similar concerns have been raised in the current situation. By acquiring an ground-to-air defensive system, Iran upped the ante - Israel would have been forced to go nuclear in a suicide attack. Let nobody misunderstand the hawkish nature of the Israeli government, that Black Sea meeting must have lowered the temperature in the entire area, so frigid must Perez have been, it shows in the photo. Despite warnings, Russia proceeded with the shipment, in a manner eerily reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis - Rahere's feeling is that Peres reminded Medvedev that their meeting place at Sochi is within range of their nukes.
Sochi is relevant to this debate, as it is the only deep-water base in Russian territory capable of taking what remains of their Black Sea fleet when their lease on the Ukrainian port of Sebastopol finishes in a couple of years' time - Rostov is the wrong side of the Kerch straights, a fleet base there could be easily bottled up. Part of the recent Israeli discussion, it transpires, was a reminder that Israel desisted from meeting a Georgian arms order last summer when Russia secured Sochi's  southern border of Souther Ossetia, a mere 30km down the coast. Rahere's feeling about the unseaworthiness of the Russian fleet is confirmed by their failure to augment its harbour, they must be proposing to ditch their main battlewagons in a similar way to how they ditched their bunkered nukes on Ukrainian territory. That makes them the nouveau poor, and that's sensitive.
The comparison to the Cuban missile crisis is noteworthy. There too, the Russians were guilty of brinkmanship until their bluff was called. That the FSB was responsible for this is beyond dispute: the Communist International is independant of the Russian state, always was and, it seems, always will be. The price they must pay for this is the loss of their Black Sea facilities, as it is clear they have been playing the Califate card. Iran, at least, has been forced to bring its nuclear policy to the table: in the meantime, Israel's doing everything possible to get its revenge on the Arabs.
And we now see a seizure of power in the UN, not merely in the Atomic Inspectors, but also in UNESCO. This kind of positioning seems intended to isolate Israel, and it must not be forgotten that Obama is not closely aligned with the hawkish Israelis. We haven't heard the end of this yet.

Given that the hawks in the Government cannot accept that Big Brother has finished, and are acting temporarily triumphant on an agenda very much under their own control, permit Rahere to remind you of a different and very real event in the same area.
Just outside the entrance to the Channel tunnel lies the sleepy Kent village of Hawkinge. In its day, it was famous as the home of the Few, the foremost fighter station in the Battle of Britain: but the airdrome is now a rail terminal for EuroTunnel and the pub, the Cat and Custard Pot, snores on. The Cat is, in passing, a most excellent pub and it is heartily recommended as the final stopover point before checking into the plastic world of convenience food in the terminal.
Quiet, that is, until 15th September 2008, when anti-terrorist police swooped on one of five houses in Curlew Place, on the edge of the village. They also turned over a Dover kebab house, and several local chippies (trust them!). No charges were brought and the Turkish owner of the kebab shop (he's actually listed as a Company Director) they arrested was released two days later, as the police were unable to make a case for longer detention.
That is a significant hint: they were searching the neighbourhood for terrorism, one returns to the procedures necessary to book a truck onto the Chunnel shuttle. Although this is denied, obviously, on 13th September Rahere received several one-degree-removed witness reports about what had happened the previous day.
According to a truck driver making his way home by rail, his truck being stuck in the tunnel, two explosions occurred. According to a ticket collector whose brother was a staffer on the shuttle train, two trucks, separated by a lorry, caught fire. The reports were not prompted in any way: they corroborate each other. Furthermore, Eurotunnel specifically excludes the transport of such dangerous materials, but does very little to actually enforce the exclusion.
Well, Rahere may have a call to Christian charity, but to fail to mention that the much-vaunted anti-terrorist forces actually missed one which took out a strategic target a year ago is straining his credulity more than a little. There's no fault in missing one, it would be impossible to catch them all, but not to draw lessons about Friday coming is irresponsible.

We now find a similar "discrepancy" in the treatment of Mrs Rochelle Wallis. Under legislation brought in to prevent "arranged" marriages, she is fleeing the country to avoid being hauled into the detention centre regime. What is her crime? To be Canadian. Alan Johnson (the same who trumpets his administration of Justice in withdrawing the civil rights of millions for fear of the harm done by three) states that he refuses to exercise his discretionary power to allow her to stay "because many other innocent victims may also be caught out by the same rule". In other words, bugger the presumption of innocence, quite apart from the very real fact her situation was directly caused by the Home Office losing her ID pictures so they failed to give her permission to  marry before her visa ran out. That man is a howling disgrace.

RP confirms my suspicion: globalisation isn't working. The fundamental failure which caused this recession is partly because of the trading imbalances we nickname Planet Zog, caused principally by the false Chinese exchange rate, and partly by the failure of the so-called pan-National businesses to create a society worthy of the name. This was typified by the American banks' failure to support Lehmans when called upon by the Fed a year ago: they never passed the Stone-Age dog-eat-dog level of civilisation.
We now find the G20 coming together to discipline the banking sector. The big question is, how long should the banks be supported? There's a certain idea that they are recovering, not least because they are repaying their borrowings - principally from funds reallocated from resources more correctly allocated to supporting the rest of the economy. But not entirely so: the creation of profits from such circumstances is only explicable by gross distortion of the markets, and as I suggested recently, that suggests a false market, which leads me to fear the ultimately inevitable correction.
The Banks are not the only players, however: G20 is discussing the internationally coordinated constraint of bankers' bonuses as the answer to the usual quibble, that if you don't pay them enough, they'll go and make their profits elsewhere. That banality omits one thing: they are a service function and unless they want to parasitise the Indian subcontinent, there's nowhere else with the size of markets to feed them in the first place. Many will in any case be only too glad to invite them to depart: the cost of their risk-avoidance has proved worse than the risks they claim to offset.
And yet even the governments, and in particular their sherpas, have failed to produce a songsheet, unable to decide how much is a reasonable remuneration package. The suggestion is legislation, at an international level: but they cannot now agree on what.  Allow Rahere to suggest the scales of a civil service accountant, and no bonuses. The risk then is that they devovlve themselves into non-banking consultancies: it's then simply a question of outlawing speculation, and enforcing the objectivity of large contractual positions by audit. That should bring things back to reality with a bump.
And even so, Darling seems to be considering his own future by trying to scupper even that. If anyone should be disbarred as an unfit and improper person, it's that one, not even having the personality to take on his job from the previous incumbent.

So, what will happen? The risk is go-it-alone in mainland Europe, leading to barriers shutting the City out. That will be the start of a trade war of sorts, leading to a generalised trading localisation.