Afghanistan Ten Years On

“They [the Haqqani Network] didn’t agree on several things, so the meetings were without any outcome. That’s why we are seeing now all these reactions and attacks going on.” A senior Afghan official.

Alphen, the Netherlands. 6 October. The first Afghan war of the twenty-first century is coming to an end as the first Afghan civil war begins. Ten years ago today the first Western soldiers were about to set foot on Afghan soil. The Taliban were then routed and it seemed likely that Al Qaeda would soon be denied the space that is Afghanistan from which to launch lethal attacks on Western civilians. Ten years on tens of thousands of Afghan lives have been lost; some 1700 American soldiers are dead alongside 400 of their British comrades, with many more dead from coalition nations. $21 billion of aid has been spent – much of it wasted or spirited away. And still the ‘strategic’ goal of a stable Afghanistan at peace with itself and the world seems an elusive dream. Yesterday’s War?

To talk privately to officials in European capitals Afghanistan has become the non-war. After all, they say, Bin Laden is dead, the Americans want out and Europeans in any case have more pressing matters, such as saving European society from financial ruin. They tell themselves that ‘they’ have done their best for what was after all another failed American war. Of course, in spite of all this no damage has been done to NATO which must now consider other futures.

There is much talk of transition – transition in to Afghan rule; transition out for the West. End 2014 is now the magic date when all major combat operations will end and by which time some grand political bargain will (of course) have been fashioned for Afghanistan. The West will (or course) stay in Afghanistan for years to come offering its aid and advice – members of a well-meaning international community. In reality only the Americans will be formally present on the ground and few at that.

The Afghans, ever-savvy fence-sitters, have not missed the meaning of the moment. The attacks by the Haqqani Network on Kabul are merely the first salvoes of a new power struggle between and within the Pashtun-led Taliban and Afghanistan’s ‘others’ over who will control what bit of the Afghan space, how and at what drug price – fuelled of course by generous doses of mischief from Afghanistan’s ever-interfering neighbours.

The race to fill the Afghan space with something that looks ever so slightly like a functioning Afghan state now enters its final, dangerous stage. What will the end look like? Will it be a formal handover of power with a nice flag-swapping military ceremony, or will it look more like the chaos of 1973 Saigon? Who knows? Whoever does know in Afghanistan?

2012 will be the pivotal year. The trick for the Americans will be to intensify peace-talks whilst fighting. Campaign momentum is everything,  Sadly, it is unlikely the Karzai Government will shift off its own fence. History suggests it will continue with some efforts to establish basic but acceptable levels of governance, whilst cutting informal deals with the members of the not-so-loyal opposition, and prepare to get out.

As ever, the situation in the south will be critical but not exclusively so. It is too early to tell if the Kandahar murder of Ahmed Wali Karzai in July 2011 has eased or complicated what passes for a political process in Afghanistan. The Pashtun represent 42% of the population but are by no means a unified body and whilst they are the political centre of gravity in Afghanistan their appeasement will only lead to conflict with the Tajiks (27%) Hazara (9%) and Uzbeks (9%).

The 2014 state of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police will thus be the true test of the West’s legacy. It is in them the West must now focus its main, last effort. Will they be able to act as a unifying national force? Will they be strong enough for Kabul to exert real control over Afghanistan? Or will they be just strong enough to spare the West’s blushes on departure? The nature of the West's departure depends on the answers to these questions.

It is not Switzerland that is being so painfully constructed in the Hindu Kush but chaos still beckons if we simply walk away. Ten years on all of us in some way engaged in the campaign - from the loftiest politician to the humblest squaddie or grunt - need to grip the importance of this moment. If not, the sacrifice will have been in vain and history will condemn those on whose inattentive watch they perished.

Yesterday’s War?

Julian Lindley-French

Euro-Crash! Now, Britain! Now's Your Time!

“I never worry about action, but only inaction”

Winston Churchill

Alphen, The Netherlands. 3 October, 2011. At the climax of the Battle of Waterloo Napoleon’s Imperial Guard tried to force the road to Brussels.  The Brigade of Guards was waiting in ambush. “Now Maitland! Now’s your time!” Wellington thundered. Immediately the Guards emerged from the long grass and fired volley after volley into the Old Guard until for the first time it broke and ran. The Battle of Waterloo was won and Brussels was saved. It is time again for Britain to save Brussels...from itself.

Throughout Europe’s long and turbulent history the English/British have always been the guarantor of Europe's stability. The British have stepped in at critical moments of crisis either to prevent an overweening neighbour from dominating the Old Continent or to prevent the worst excesses of an unhinged ideology. It is a mark of Britain’s decline and the lack of leadership at the top of power in London that David Cameron and his team have been reduced to talking about the Eurozone crisis as if a) it is ‘nuffing to do with us, guv’; b) something to be swept under London’s increasingly threadbare political carpet; and/or c) wailing like some latter day Cassandras from the rapidly eroding margins.

The bottom-line is this; as Europe’s second or third largest economy, biggest financial market and Europe’s most capable military power it is precisely at this moment of existential crisis for the EU that Britain must show its traditional genius for pragmatic leadership…or leave the EU. That is effectively the choice on offer to London. No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’.

Britain still has real political and popular influence over here but it is fast waning. My Dutch neighbours are puzzled by Britain’s impotence, and not a little offended by it. Where is the country that twice in the last century saved Europeans from servitude? The village in which I live was liberated by a huge British-led army that swept through here in 1944. Much of the democratic shape of modern Europe is down to Britain’s leadership. People are again looking to Britain and Britain is failing them.

The good news is that Britain has not had such an opportunity to lead for at least a generation. For my Dutch neighbours it is precisely because Britain is not in the Euro that Britain should lead. People all around me are suddenly volunteering the belief that Britain was right after all – the Euro as conceived back in the 1990s simply does not work and never will. And yet, more or much more Brussels seem to be the options on the table and the Dutch, that most European of nations, have no appetite for more Brussels.

Britain thus needs a plan to return the EU from whence it came; to enable Europe’s democratic nation-states to influence better together today’s hyper-competitive world under the leadership of Europe’s democratic nation-states. The mantra? More cooperation, less integration.

Britain’s plan would re-assert national sovereignty over key areas of European policy and strategy.  To that end Prime Minister Cameron should first join Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy to stabilise the immediate crisis, even if that costs money. In return Cameron must insist on the repatriatriation of key areas of policy, such as social, labour, foreign and security policy - even if that means a new treaty.  He should move decisively to end ever closer political union, i.e. more political integration, and insist that the European Commision's powers of decision-making be returned to the European Council  - where the will of the member-states is enacted.  The European Commission should be reduced to a much smaller enabling body with its powers of policy initiation removed.

The size and cost of all European institutions should be reviewed so that the damaging confusion over 'competence' is brought to a rapid end.  Many of the meaningless but expensive posts and structures created by the Lisbon Treaty should be scrapped; such as the European President and the European Foreign Minister and the hopelessly Byzantine European External Action Service (EEAS). The European Parliament should be reformed and reduced in size so that real politicians, i.e. national parliamentarians, rotate through a much smaller consultative institution that sits solely in Brussels. The pretentions for the EU to have a separate legal and political identity on the international stage should also be scrapped. Finally, Britain should agree to a revised monetary union for those who a) want it; and b) agree to fiscal harmonisation but insist that ALL EU member-states have a say over the running of such a union.

If not the unelected Euro-fanatics could well win the day in the name of short-term expediency.  That will mean an even more unaccountable, ‘communitarian’ Brussels.  In time, it will also mean more national sovereignty will vanish down a Brussels black hole and thus be lost to incompetence and secrecy. It will certainly mean that any pretence to a link between European power and the European people will vanish leading to a ‘Europe’ run by faceless Eurocrats overseen by toothless and meaningless institutions dangerously far distant from the ordinary citizen.

What gives Britain the right? As one of my Dutch neighbours said to me, “We could not understand when the Euro was created why you British did not want to join. Now we do and you were right, just as you were right about the Constitutional Treaty and European defence”. This crisis is too important for Britain to stand aside. London must lead the EU or leave it.

Now Britain! Now’s your time!

Julian Lindley-French

Britain and the EU: The Day of Reckoning Approaches

"It was an illusion to think that we could have a common currency and a single market with national approaches to economic and budgetary policy."

Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

London, 29 September. The Euro-crunch is upon us and with it perhaps the most delicate and dangerous moment in the EU’s history. Indeed, the implications of what is about to happen are slowly only becoming apparent. One of the most profound of which could be the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union.

The Euro can only survive if the EU and the Euro become one and that by definition excludes Britain. It also means more integration and that in turn means more power transferred to unaccountable Brussels. Talking to a couple of very senior British politicians in London it is clear that Britain will never adopt the Euro whoever is in power. Nor will London accept the hidden integration necessary to solve the Euro-crisis and Britain’s consequent marginalisation. Least of all will the British pay the price for something of which Britain is not a part.  The alternative is to simply accept leadership by a Germany that does not want it.

A couple of years ago I breakfasted in Washington with former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. I made the point to him that the Union had reached the point where London could no longer pretend to the British people that the Union is merely a super-market. If the Union moved decisively towards political and economic union the British would be faced with the worst of all worlds – subject to the Brussels diktat without influence over it. Fischer’s response was blunt; if that is how the British think then very well go. That moment has now arrived.  So long as the Euro was not the Union the pretence of a messy fiction could be maintained and Britain could remain within the EU even if it was not a Eurozone member. Not any more.

The implications of Britain’s departure would be profound to say the very least.  Critically, the checks and balances on Germany’s power that Berlin is rightly conscious of would be profoundly weakened.  Britain’s presence guarantees the essential balance of big state power at the heart of the Union. And, in spite of London’s current travails and its many idiocies Germans have long-understood the importance of Britain’s role, particularly now as Berlin emerges from history to become the undisputed master of Europe.

Is there an alternative to German leadership? Whilst a believer in the concept of a more united Europe of states I have been extremely critical of a system that under the guise of ‘integration’ has emphasised the power of bureaucracy at the expense of democratic legitimacy...and rightly so.  Nothing in European history suggests that such an approach is politically sound. And yet, if the runes are to be read correctly – and one has to read runes on these occasions because of the obsessive culture of secrecy in Brussels which too often sees the European people as enemy – the bureaucracy is about to be given a whole raft of new powers to save the single currency.

The increased commitment to 'communitarianism' called for by Commission President Barroso, is one of those euphemisms beloved of the Euro-Aristocracy which runs the bureaucracy to place themselves ever closer to the very heart of European power for the sake of expediency. The really cheeky bit is that they also want the British to pay for much of it. The call for the Transaction or Tobin Tax on banking transactions to help pay for the European Financial Stability Facility would see the British contributing 80%.  The rest? The Facility might need to be expanded to a staggering €2 trillion if the so-called 'Blockbuster Fund' is set up to cover all debt across southern Europe.  Moerover, with the European Central Bank already swimming under a mountain of junk debt it is I the Dutch taxpayer who will have to guarantee what is in effect going to be a transfer to the south of what little wealth I have for many years to come.

Whatever choice is made it will not be by or for the British and thus the further marginalisation of Britain is inevitable. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democratic Deputy Prime Minister, believes Britain has more influence by remaining within the EU. However, if the EU core are about to create a system from which Britain is excluded but for which it must pay then that is clearly no longer the case.  In such circumstances EU membership would no longer make strategic sense for London.  Quite the reverse in fact because a future Britain would be better placed to play its vital balancing role outside the Eurozone/EU political singularity.

Therefore, all concerned might need to pause for a moment and consider the consequences.  Commission President Barroso has rightly said that this is the EU’s most dangerous moment. With its coming the EU could now well have embarked on the road to the final reckoning over Britain and its membership. If that is a conscious choice then so be it. However, if it is an unintended consequence then beware.  For all concerned some thinking is needed now about how best for Britain to depart with least damage.

Some of you in Brussels will scoff.  There will be those amongst you who believe that in time the British will be forced to join the Euro and accept more Brussels not less.  That would be a mistake. The appalling mismanagement of this crisis has made that option simply impossible. That was the message of my political interlocutors in London - one Conservative, one Labour.

History also offers a salutary lesson to our European partners. Never under-estimate us!

Julian Lindley-French

The SAS War Diaries: Who Thinks Wins

"Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."

Sun Tzu

London. 26 September. They literally leapt to prominence in May 1980 when Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) stormed Iran’s hijacked London embassy. I was watching snooker on the BBC at the time as coverage was interrupted to cover the assault live. It was the dawn of the 24/7 media age in which we live today. I can still remember the mixture of awe and amazement as masked men swooped down from helicopters armed with stun grenades and light machine guns. This was the stuff of James Bond.

Thanks to the now copious (and mainly bad) books about the ultra-secret SAS and their motto – Who Dares Wins - a mystique has been cultivated in the international public mind that sees these superstars of the British Army less the extremely good soldiers they are and more latter day super-heroes.  Thanks to that the SAS are one of the few elements of Britain’s strategic brand to have survived intact London’s headlong retreat from military influence. Therefore, the revelation that an SAS Trooper had built up a detailed war diary of the regiment’s World War Two activities was to say the least a surprise. What the book demonstrates is the vital importance of the thinking soldier – then and now. Could this offer a way forward for all Europe’s soldiery?

The now sterile debate over Europe’s militaries can be characterised thus; not enough invested in what works and too much in what does not. The same by the way goes for the British Army. I still find it hard to understand why an army with a force in excess of 100,000 people finds it so hard to deploy and sustain 10,000 of their number. The SAS turns all of that upside down and has done since its creation back in 1941. It was not mass that mattered to them, but impact. In a sense they were the ultimate British military caricatures – a Formula One army rather than a mass production army, the latter of which has never quite suited the British.

When I cast my eye across the faded glories of many European militaries it is indeed like wandering around one of those fantastic European war museums - hugely impressive and utterly out of date. It was a world in which army divisions were made up of tens of thousands and in turn formed parts of armies made up of hundreds of thousands.  Any one country may have had several such armies organised into army groups. Today, what were once armies are now battle groups of several hundred or so men, whilst the great regiments have become the battalions of which battle groups are made. As we witness the miniaturisation of Europe’s once great armies it is unlikely European armies will ever again deploy a division. And yet never has something so small cost so much.

So, why not make virtue out of necessity? It was the very smallness of SAS units, allied to their intelligence, that made them so agile and flexible. They could range far and wide behind enemy lines disrupting and destroying and then vanishing. They had the best equipment and knew how to make best use of it and out-planned, out-moved and out-thought the enemy

Today, most European armed forces are trapped between maintaining a very pale imitation of a force Napoleon, Wellington or Blucher would have recognised and an even paler imitation of the SAS. A lack of political leadership, clear military thinking, nostalgia and the political influence of old soldiers has thus turned much of Europe’s armed forces into a series of extremely expensive museums.  They have missions defined by a shrinking list of the things they used to be able to do, rather than the things we would really like them to be able to do. European defence planning is thus in effect a little bit pregnant – incurring the costs of pregnancy without the prospect of bringing forth something that in time might kick, bite and scream.

Defence strategy demands of a society that it exploits comparative advantage. Military strategy requires its armed forces to be able to do exactly what an enemy least desires. European society is educated and technological. It is also individualistic and yet collaborative.  It can think for and of itself but is disciplined and open enough to understand the vital role of partners. In other words, Europe’s comparative advantage is its human capital, which is precisely the comparative advantage of the SAS..

Whether planned for or not the future European soldier will be first and foremost a thinking soldier, aware of the context of his or her actions, able to undertake a wide range of tasks across the conflict spectrum, and connected by technology to other key partners both civilian and military. This is exactly how David Stirling conceived the SAS back in 1941. But can we Europeans design a system in which our soldiers will be best able to exploit that comparative advantage?

Certainly, a pretty radical re-think would be needed. First, all the many legacy units and platforms weighing our armies down would need to be scrapped. Second, all conscripts would need to go. Third, a much more modular command chain would be required to enable smaller units to integrate, detach and re-form as required. Third, a command culture would be needed that emphasised small unit leadership. Fourth, at least twice (probably more) of today’s average investment per European soldier would be needed. Too costly?  In fact, we could afford such a force without spending more.

Today, only 10% of Europe’s 2 million soldiers are of any real use with the €180 billion or so spent annually spent vso badly that it is a criminal waste of European taxpayer’s money.  Look at the alternative.  Spent effectively €180 billion could pay for a force of some 500,000 cutting-edge thinking soldiers.  It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which Europeans would need more or any force or circumstance that could defeat it.

At the core of the whole effort there would to be something very new; a defence education system that took the best and the brightest and gave them not only what they needed to know to succeed, but better enabled them to know how to know. Knowledge power and fighting power are the twin barrels of SAS effect and will be so for Europe's future warriors.

The SAS are a legend. However, there is nothing Arthurian about them. Veiled in an almost impenetrable mask of necessary secrecy the Hereford Men generate respect and fear in friend and foe alike. Ultimately, what the diaries reveal is something quintessentially simple; a force that was simply extremely good at soldiering in all its forms, employing something for which armed forces have not always been renowned for – brains.  And, it still is.

Who thinks wins – this is a lesson that should be grasped by all Europe’s armed forces.

Julian Lindley-French

Beware Julians Bearing Gifts

Alphen, the Netherlands,

24 September, 2011

Dear Greeks,

I have just been listening to more Euro-twaddle from one of your ministers on the BBC. I suppose it is my warped sense of humour but I just love the twisted metaphors those responsible for this disaster employ to avoid the simple truth. To bail you out of the mess you created I will have to spend much of my hard-earned money with absolutely no guarantee that a) you will be grateful; or b) you will change. And, I will have to do it for a very long time.   So, what do you want?  Do we get the pain over with quickly and kick you out of the Euro, do I suffer the pain of your financial toothache for years to come, or are you really prepared to make the sacrifices that will justify my funding you?

To help you clear your thinking let me as a Dutch taxpayer explain to those of you in Greece about to take to the streets to demand more of my money to fund your lifestyle something you may wish to know about my lifestyle. I am not a rich man so the money you take from me matters. I earn most of my money as a freelancer and as I have no generous safety net I just have to get up early in the morning and work hard. Much of my day is spent writing reports, advising, writing papers and looking for new ways to earn money. The blogs you read are often written in the dead of night when I have the time. I am 53 years of age and will be working until the day I drop. Now, as I understand it you want me to fund a lot of you so you can retire at 55. I rather think not.

Sadly, the market in which I must today operate is becoming progressively worse and my income is falling as a result. This is partly because the bankers who got us into the 2008 disaster refuse to lend to each other let alone to little people like me who are trying to make a go of it. No problems, the bankers know how to look after themselves.

But let us be clear. It is also because the government I fund has to cut its budget hard and raise my taxes to pay for the consequences of a life-style that too many of you seem to regard as your right. Not all of you. I have too great a respect for Greece to blame you all for this mess. Nor do I view all southern Europeans as one.  Each case is different.  Spain, for example, is relatively sound to my mind and Italy a big enough economy with sufficiently strong fundamentals to pull through.

Moreover, I am even prepared to accept another dose of the one-way ‘solidarity’ beloved of the European Onion and its Euro-Aristocrats if I could be sure that once and for all you would get your financial house in order. But that’s the point, I cannot. How can I be sure that a couple of years downstream you will not come back to me and demand more of my hard-earned money? Give me some hope here.

Nor do I wholly blame your government for putting all that I have worked for at risk, even though they are a pretty rum lot. Our own Dear Leaders should have stopped you from running away with my money a long time ago. Sadly, at the time the Euro-Aristocracy of which they are a part were too busy slapping each other on the back for their ‘vision’ whilst of course quaffing another glass of that very good Dom Perignon 53, which had been paid for by my hard work.

Of course, the greater the disaster the more opaque the metaphors leaders retreat into to avoid the hard facts of failure. The European Central Bank is moving to calm the markets, we are told. The European Central Bank needs the ‘support’ of the Onion’s richer member-states, we are told. Governments are working hard to agree the terms of the latest bail out, we are told. What they really mean is that they are all working hard to deprive me of more of my hard-earned money so they can spend it on you.

So, my dear Greek friends remember when you are protesting for the protection of your living standards what you really want is more of my money so I can lose my living standards. Ask yourselves just what it is you are going to give me in return. At the very least a few of you could carry placards saying “We demand more of Julian’s money”. At least it would be honest. Above all, remember that old Greek saying – Beware Julians bearing gifts! If you have my money there will be a price to pay.

Pass the Ouzo, I need it!

All best,

Julian Lindley-French

The 2012 Euro Crash: The Hole is Less that the Sum of the Parts

“Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude”

Cicero

Rome. The eternal city. As I hand-draft this thought Agrippa’s second century Pantheon soars above my head, its oculus open to the heavens. Still the largest unsupported concrete dome ever built it is a testament to a political truism as cogent today as it ever was; structure may endure long after power and principle have collapsed.

Your blogonaut has been stung into writing this piece by the base accusation from a Euro-Caesar that I have become a Euro-septic. Me, who has suckled from the teat of the Onion’s she-wolf like some latter-day son of Aeneas. Even the insults are archaic these days.

Rome’s great sons Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar and, of course, Octavian all claimed the power of Dictator to save the Roman Republic from disaster. “Trust me”, they all chimed, “the Republic is safe in my hands”. The rest is history as the Republic fell to be replaced by the autocracy of Empire. Cicero and Cato were isolated voices railing against the loss of Rome’s ancient liberties but so seductive were the crisis calls that their respective sticky ends elicited little public concern. What mattered was the here and now, not the maybe and then.

Now, I do not for a minute see the Onion as Dictator. Nor do I doubt the good intentions of those members of Europe’s leadership class now clambering for more Europe not less as we approach the 2012 Euro crash. But beware what you desire. More Europe would be a less accountable Europe. The Onion would become even more bureaucratic and thus offer more opportunities for the bureaucracy to do what bureaucracies have always done; draw ever more power unto self. There would be much talk of effectiveness and efficiency as conformity replaced diversity and free-thought was reduced to sedition. The result would be incompetence tinged with intolerance.  The curbing of liberties no doubt offered as progress cynically celebrated by the trappings of a false Triumph, and all of course done in the name of the People.

The danger is real. The Onion has traditionally expanded its unaccountable ‘competence’ (good Onion-speak that) at such moments of friction. Known as neo-functionalism it is power creep beloved of the bureaucratic classes that sit at the right hands of the Euro-Aristocracy. There is real pressure to ensure that no other state becomes another Greece to the Onion’s Rome and this is pressing the Euro-Aristocracy to call for more state sovereignty to be poured down the Brussels black-hole like some inverted Pantheon with the oculus now drain.

The forthcoming annus horribilis thus sees the Onion as Aristotle's Metaphysica reversed in which the hole is less than the sum of the parts. At its heart lies an incapable Onion that in turn renders its parts impotent. Today, Europe has a very bad pretend super-state allied to ever-weakening under-states the latter led by politicians forced to talk the language of pretend power. It is just at such points when legitimate government has been rendered incompetent that would-be Caesars call for power to be ‘centralised’. Act in haste; oppress at leisure.

There is something else I notice sitting here beneath the cavernous emptiness that is the Pantheon. The original Roman magnificence has been blighted by what can only be described as appalling Baroque marble graffiti. Today, the Pantheon really is the Roman equivalent of a Yorkshire outside toilet with bay windows on it.

If the Onion was just an Onion and focussed on supporting Europe’s states by co-ordinating and harmonising state action then common sense might just prevail. But so many ‘ambitions’ now adorn the Onion that it has taken on a whole new architecture that very few ordinary Europeans ever signed up for. The Plebs are thus reduced to being distant, impotent witnesses to a political destiny over which they will have little control. They may be offered the odd plebiscite but only if they give the answer deemed Euro-politic by the Euro-Aristocracy.

The Pantheon’s magnificence reflected the vigour of power that was Agrippa’s and Hadrian’s second century Rome. But, in time the very creeping competence of the Empire destroyed it. Lacking legitimacy from within it had to conquer without to prevent the political edifice from crashing under the weight of its own political obesity. Rome the idea became Rome the mighty and perished because of it.

Scroll down 2000 years and the 2012 Euro crash. If the Onion’s power is increased yet further the still utterly immature European Parliament will offer no protection for Europe’s citizens in the face of an over-mighty but incompetent Euro-bureaucracy. Its Tribunes will either be co-opted or dismissed and the most we may hope for are Consuls and Praetors loosely legitimised by a European people knowing not why they vote nor for whom.

So, I am no Euro-septic, just a European who at this moment of profound danger fears for a politically septic Europe. I believe in Europe; but not this Europe.

Julian Lindley-French

Rotten Eggs and Stinking Onions

“…what one finds is that aristocracy seems to emerge from the very midst of democracy as the result of a natural effort”.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alphen, the Netherlands. 19 September. Watching former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn bear his soul to the French people was painful. His dalliance with a chambermaid in a New York hotel was explained away as a ‘moral failing’. Strauss-Kahn’s ‘confession’ followed a now well-trodden path of false humility from a cynical member of Europe’s über-class. And yet, the very people who caused the banking and Euro disasters, of whom he is one are asking for even more power to fix their crises.

It is the European Onion which created the new Euro-Aristocracy born of political and bureaucratic patronage and the Bankokleptocracy that supports them. They have skilfully exploited the democratic and sovereignty deficit at the Onion’s core. What a strange place Europe has become when no-one quite knows who controls what and what a dangerous moment this is for European democracy. It is as though the twin crises are inadvertently recreating the l’ancien regime swept away by the French Revolution in 1789, albeit a la l’Europe.

The 2008 banking crisis is not over. We are merely at half-time. 60% of economic output will be lost by the time the banking crisis and the Euro meltdown are eventually resolved. Indeed, our children will be paying for the consequences of banker’s greed and political insanity for many years to come. The casino banking which caused the crash is alive and well. None of the fraudsters who robbed millions of us of income and interest have been jailed. They continue with their champagne life-styles and their bogus bonuses whilst governments cut public services and contracts to sweep fraud under our carpets.

Last week a 31 year old Ghanaian, Kweku Adoboli, was arrested in London for allegedly gambling away some 1.5 billion Euros whilst working for Swiss bank UBS. Who will be in charge of the internal UBS investigation? It will be a certain Mr David Sidwell, the former Chief Financial Officer of JP Morgan bank, who were at the forefront of the so-called ‘forward setting’ that led to the 2008 crash.

The British Government said it would support the findings of a review that called for retail banking (the bit you and I use) to be separated from casino banking. But, of course, nothing is to happen until 2019. The over-mighty subjects in the banks pretend to complain but they know all too well it is mere theatre. They are above and beyond the control of any and all governments and in any case deals have been done behind the scenes in today’s health and safety equivalents of dark, smoke-filled rooms...and well beyond the public gaze.

Of course, Mr Adoboli, if found guilty will be hung out to dry. He will face an exemplary sentence. There will be much talk of him being a rotten egg in an otherwise sound basket of financial services. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was able to inflict such damage precisely because the entire edifice is rotten to the core with rotten eggs integral to a system that lacks any moral compass.

And then we have the Euro-crisis. I now await the day when it is announced that a super-tax is to be imposed upon me to pay for the Greeks and their southern neighbours who can no longer be bothered to work or pay taxes; and to do so the value of my Euro savings has been slashed. Which brings me to the most galling aspect of this crisis; at last week’s meeting in Poland our wining, dining leaders once again tried to wish the disaster away. No decision action was taken, no finger-prints could thus be found at the scene of the crime.

Instead, having created this appalling mess our Dear Leaders are now claiming that the only way forward is fiscal union. Now, if I was a real cynic I would suggest that the crisis was built into the Euro from Day One precisely so that the über-class could at some point by-pass democratic oversight. Fiscal union is but one short step from political union and with it a huge increase in the role and cost of the Onion in our daily lives.

The European Parliament? It is incapable of providing effective political oversight. Indeed, the only difference between it and a travelling circus is that the latter at least provides entertainment, even if most of the clowns are to be found in Parliament.

It is time therefore to go back to first principles. First, the banks must be brought under proper legislative control and that means national parliaments working together. If they threaten to leave Europe as a result then those banks must be denied the right to trade in Europe and thus forced to sell their European operations to European banks under proper control. Second, if Greece (or any other) fails to bring its budget deficit down to a level commensurate with its treaty obligations it must be forced to leave the Euro. A time limit must also be established for that to be achieved. Third, no new treaty can be agreed by the Euro-Aristocracy that passes more power to the Onion without a referendum in each member-state. Fourth, planning must now begin for the orderly replacing of the Euro, either with national currencies or with a Euro focussed on an inner-core to which other currencies are pegged.

I know I am going to pay a price for this mess but I want to know now what it is and be assured that what emerges is transparent and effective.

The bankokleptocracy is full of rotten eggs; aided and abetted by a Euro-Aristocracy that has hijacked a once noble idea for narrow gain – the Onion. When are we ever going to learn?

Julian Lindley-French