A higher doody

This is truly bizarre. Surely a much worse an example is being set to the Santorum core constituency by the supreme Pontiff's own spring break visit to Mexico next week?

Santorum's apparently confused logic — on the one hand he's essentially a theocrat yet speaks the language of libertarianism — is depressingly typical of the American right these days. Yet one recalls that this odd juxtapostion of totalitarianism and libertarianism was very much to the fore in the discourse of the Spanish left before the Civil War, and only really started to properly come apart during that conflict.

Debt-ceiling debacle

Well, the Septics have got to be thankful that there's hardly anywhere else in the developed world that looks a safer bet for stashing large amounts of loot at low risk right now.

Still, the fact that there was in the end considerable bi-partisan support in both houses for welcoming catastrophe with wide-open arms, means that nobody outside the US will have watched this artificial crisis without drawing some obvious conclusions about that nation's long-term reliability as a safe haven, let alone as the de-facto leader-by-example of the global economic system.

Whether or not the ratings agencies have the cojones to do anything about it is another matter. The long-term issue of national indebtedness won't go away until the Bush tax cuts are reversed out and a very serious look is taken at other entitlements paid for at the Federal level. Let's not mention all the overseas empire not-building.

Obama got caught out. He did nothing when he controlled Congress and before it filled up with delusional loons from the Tea Party. Their cultist approach to the constitution is perhaps little more than sublimated racism, but in times of worldwide insecurity it's really not ideal to have that many apocalyptically-inclined politicians in a position to make (or break) the key practical decisions facing humanity right now.

They know the President is by nature inclined to doing deals and doesn't quite know how to handle people who will go all the way for their belief in the counter-factual.

Should he get a second term, Obama has to hope that the American electorate will have figured out the difference between fact and opinion and will have extirpated these extremists from their bridgehead in Washington.

Ambassador Bolton

Has been a bugbear of mine since his ludicrously obstreperous appearance on David Dimbleby's presidential election night show in 2008. Clearly John Bolton feels more comfortable in the company of his own sort. And so it was that he appeared on Fox News on Friday night, and in spite of the reported arrest of a lone, blond-haired Norwegian man with apparent extremist political and religious views, the massacre was still in his opinion, unlikely to the the work of local right-wingers.

Charlie Brooker also saw this bizarre interview:

"Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it's the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn't – at which point, continue to assume it's them anyway."

What this confirmed for me was the now almost absolute association in American political discourse, especially that of the right, between fact and opinion. If I believe something to be so, then it must be, and more's the point, you must also believe it to be so.

Deferred crunch?

From the Reagan era onwards successive US administrations created the conditions in which around $1.5 trillion anti-gravitated upwards to the richest 1% of the population. This being more capital than the fuckoff rich could actually handle by themselves, they duly sent about $1 trillion back down the wealth pyramid in the form of highly suspect loans, largely targeting the very people who'd been missing out on the party (and boy had they been made to know what a friggin' cool fiesta this was).

We all know what happened next. An unthinkably large and very black hole opened up beneath the global financial system. Like Wile-e Coyote, the banks didn't realise that they had been running in mid-air until the late summer of 2008.

Such was the magnitude of the problem and the interconnectedness of its constituent parts, that even the party representing the interests of the richest 1% under a cloak of populism and jubilant ignorance, had no choice but to step in and transfer much of the risk from the private to the state sector, from bankers to taxpayers (and bondholders, lest we forget) — or from capitalism to socialism, according to the Republican Party's kool-aid quaffers.

Socialism doesn't usually involve building levees around storm-threatened capital, but in the US the bail-outs were accompanied by a change of administration and a 'stimulus' package involving increased largesse from central purses...and that's like, socialism, right?

Anyway, this urge to borrow and spend yet more came about partly because the new guys at the helm had a long-standing commitment to bringing America's treatment of the sick up to civilised norms, brooded over long before the Crunch. That the inefficient structures being replaced actually cost more (and thus implied bigger government) than the full-coverage systems of 'socialised' medicine operated by several European countries, wasn't something that the ideologues wished to ponder much at this point.

Whether or not one is oddly predisposed to see the transfer of risk from the corporate sphere to the state and its system of public debt in strictly Marxist terms (Capitalism v Socialism), the truth is that the sickness itself is essentially unchanged: a cancer within the global credit market.

Stimulus in the States and austerity in the EU appeared for a while to have kept it in remission, but over the past fortnight or so we've been seeing how the Eurozone could become the weakest link in the ongoing therapy package.

Suddenly you had a single currency with multiple attitudes and responses to the sudden surge of government debt as a proportion of GDP. Some of the member countries were caught with their pants down. In fact the Irish had yanked their own trousers down with gay abandon in 2006, an uninhibited display of fiscal self-endangerment which tempted the likes of WPP to pack up and move to Dublin. (Even a canny number-cruncher like Sir Martin Sorrel was unable to ask the obvious question of this deal which looked too good to be true.) While the Greeks are by nature inclined to take a narrow bend on a mountain road at full speed, the Irish simply thought they'd chance it in order to make a few extra Euros.

Who's next in the line of dominos? Spanish banks appeared to have dodged the sub-prime bullet, but GDP in Spain had been overreaching itself, so when the local construction boom turned to bust, they got caught holding the gruesome negative equity baby anyway. They are also carrying considerable exposure to Portuguese debt and Portugal is on most people's list as European sovereign state 'Most Likely to Go Tits-up Next'. (Though some have their money on Belgium with its disfunctional political system.)

Furthermore, as a member of the Eurozone, Spain has limited defences against a concerted speculative attack. If the bond market considers it a default-risk, the cost of government borrowing (and in 2011 it will need to conduct a substantial new round) will soar which will make the upping of Spain's tits something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The question is, Is Spain TBTF? And what of France, where the political will to impose austerity is likely to waver in the face of the sort of social commotion they just adore over there.

The tumour is still there, largely in remission, and nobody really thinks that the patient (even if its just the European single currency we're talking about) can be allowed to die. But can it really be 'austerised' out of the European body politic, and hasn't this crisis revealed that the Euro has a genetic predisposition towards ailing from this kind of credit cancer?

Aftermath

Being 'conservative' used to be all about stopping other people having fun. Nowadays there's something of a continuum, with plenty of self-professed conservatives espousing a philosophy that's more about having as much fun as one can oneself — within the limitations of natural ability and privilege — even if that also leads to an increase in misery elsewhere, albeit more indirectly. (So when Don Marco recently quipped that he had been considered "too conservative" for the likes of those Navarrense nutters Opus Dei, we need not suspect him of being some sort of modern-day Savonarola.)

In British politics it's the current PM Gordon Brown who has the most solid killjoy credentials. So for a long time all David Cameron really had to do was to not be Gordon Brown, and a large chunk of the British people would vote for him with some sense of relief. But this week we also saw that a newly re-engaged electorate is still largely unsure where Cameron's crop of Conservatives stand on this all-important axis of fun.

Before the economic crisis and Labour's bankrupting of the country, Cameron had quite effectively repositioned the Tory form of conservatism towards environmental concerns: a slightly more clued-up variant of the hedge-hugging royal conservatism most closely associated with Prince Charles, which in middle-England form is perhaps the one type of self-restraint (i.e. feel-bad) which comes with a feel-good emotional pay-off.

Voters are now seeing however, that when all else fails, the thing the Conservatives most want to conserve is the political status quo, and in this situation that means the electoral system which will only present those pesky Lib-Dems with an opportunity such as they now possess, roughly once every generation or so.

This will have been the sixth General Election I would have been eligible to vote in and has in fact been the second in succession in which I failed to do so. In the other four I've voted for the Tories twice and once apiece for Labour and the Lib-Dems...as far as I can remember.

The voting system that has become so moot this month in the UK encourages tactical democracy. So if I had been in the UK and willing to take part this time, my voting intentions would surely have been influenced by the constituency I was registered to vote in.

I grew up in Chelsea, a safe seat for the Tories and then moved out east to Tower Hamlets, equally un-loseable for Labour. If we still had our home out there in the Docklands, I'd probably have voted for the Lib-Dems...knowing that this was a decision which would ultimately have no impact whatsoever on the make-up of Parliament.

But if I'd registered in Newbury, the constituency within which sits my current UK registered address, I'd have plugged for the sitting Conservative MP Richard Benyon, who barely scraped past the Lib-Dems last time. His family have been wielding power in the area since before the franchise was extended to people living in small houses, but he's proved an excellent local representative and indeed increased his majority considerably last week.

Rather late in the day V has come round to seeing the appeal of Nick Clegg. He might not be left-handed like Cameron, but he's seizing his moment now with great self-assurance, she informs me. (But he went to Westminster the voices say....)

The Tories have got to be hoping that they can string him along for a while before shaking him off their leg after yet another election, possibly as early as the Autumn.

As for Brown, he's done a lot better than most of us suspected he would. Frankly we thought the sniffer dogs would still be out hunting for him after a landslide swing against New Labour. But it didn't happen that way, and now his party (should the Conservatives and Lib-Dems cosy up) has an interesting opportunity to regenerate itself in opposition before the next polling day, for which we are unlikely to have to wait another four years.

This means that Gordon Brown will be able to leave the UK's highest office in much the same way that he was appointed to it, in a process almost wholly disconnected from the ballot box, more akin to the way that large companies handle the discreet exit of their less successful CEOs.

It will be interesting to see what happens if and when Cameron and Clegg get their hands on the books and can report back to us on just how upfront Brown has been about the parlous state of public finances in Britain.

Personal responsibility

In most modern democracies politicians tend to be a self-selecting sub-set of society which habitually allows its judgment to be clouded by ideology — and thus arguably one of those least apt for governing us.

No amount of empirical evidence demonstrating that Saddam was neither in cahoots with Al Qaeda nor stockpiling WMDs could shake Tony Blair from his conviction that invading Iraq was the right thing to do at the time. With the facts building up against him, he turned to Catholicism.

With their underlying ideological committment to personal responsibility British conservatives are once again donning their dogma goggles so that they may better pontificate on the perennially thorny matter of the undeserving poor and helpless.

Smokers and the clinically obese should pay more tax than people who lead healthy lifestyles, their leader David Cameron now tells us, because they present a greater risk of actually deriving some individual benefit from their taxes via hospital care.

But hold on, that's not what the facts say. Longer-living health nuts actually cost the NHS more than all those morally despicable fatties and fumadores; for it is longevity itself which determines an individual's lifetime burden on the health service. Smokers die young and quickly on average. But when did facts ever stop a politician — especially a right-winger who likes nothing better than kicking those who are already down. (Full disclosure: nunca he fumado.)

British Conservatism hasn't always been so Ayn Randy. According to Colin Kidd "ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch - at least not in public."

Many old school party members have nevertheless remained convinced that consumerism has made us all a bit soft, degenerate even, and that — as Kidd puts it — it is "but a small step from..quilted toilet paper to long-haired decadence, dysfunctional families and drug addiction."

But Keith Joseph had made "saloon-bar Malthusianism" deeply unfashionabled, so Margaret Thatcher undertook to handle devisive ethical matters with a circumspection few American Republicans would get their heads around today.

Kidd's comments come in his excellent LRB review of Alexander Brown's Personal Responsibility: Why it Matters, a book which aims to show that politicians, perhaps more than any other social group, tend to underestimate the philosophical incommensurables surrounding the issue of how society determines which individuals to support (based on their circumstances and lifestyle choices).

Amongst the conceptual minefields are those of Free Will and Misfortune: eg. brute luck or misadventures arising from one's own or someone else's misguided risk-taking.

For example, there are many people in the world today, smokers and single mothers included, whose straightened circumstances can at least in part be blamed on the inability of certain Wall Street traders to understand basic economics and business practice. And Kidd explains how herd instincts, peer pressure etc. are liable to affect the behaviour of all members of society, such that not only bankers find it hard to take a principled strand.

There does seem to be a lot of evidence to suggest that we eat more if most of our friends are gluttons, and this in turn would appear to be the perfect recipe for one of those self-reinforcing cycles.