In the third of the programmes, The Ascent of Money, Professor Niall Fergusson embarked what I regard so far is his most important, albeit depressing, programme. The main issue discussed in the programme is the way states, speculators and individuals can hedge against the unforeseen tragedy, the loss of job, the potential loss of home or dying unexpectedly and leaving dependent. However what emerged is the failure, so far, of all attempts to provide guaranteed security against all possible perils of humankind and of nature,
The idea of insurance for the individual against tragedies and unforeseen circumstances only commenced in the UK, in Scotland, by a group of clergymen after 1800. The had developed a system of contributing to a fund to meet the needs of widowed parishioners and decided it would a good idea to raise money beforehand, create a fund and use interest to provide assistance, and they worked out the likely number of widows in the future to establish how much they needed to contribute. This developed into the Scottish Widows fund and which continued to exist as a separate mutual body only until recently when if became part of the Lloyds TSB empire. In discussing the subject mention was made that in the UK people insure more than elsewhere, although we are said to be one of the safest countries on the planet, not withstanding the floodings over the over the past couple of years.
In the UK we also tend to believe that outside the former Communist countries we were the first to develop a comprehensive state system of welfare to protect everyone in times of need. The programme argued that in fact it was Japan who developed such a system, originally to create its fighting force providing support for the widows and their children. It is now Japan that is facing the biggest crisis because of the increasing imbalance between those in work and those needing help, especially in relation to its aging population where the country became the first where the elderly commenced to live increasingly longer. The programme did not say why this has happened but I speculate that this is to do with the diet, especially the emphasis on fish and the self discipline and work ethic which results in people being active and not overweight.
The programme then examined the move away from welfarism which commenced not in the USA or with Thatcher in the UK but with Pinochet in Chile under the influence of Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman who died aged 94 in 2006 started as advocate of John Maynard Keynes the economist also favoured at Ruskin with his approach to welfare economics within a capitalist framework. As with all creative thinkers who challenged existing orthodoxy there is a tendency to reject or adopt everything without first testing, evaluation, and then accepting, rejecting or modifying. There is also a tendency to construct a political as well as economic system and then a moral framework. Thus his main work on Capitalism and Freedom made connections and associations which were dangerous as we are now experiencing. His approach was understandable as was the way his approach was taken up by President Regan and Thatcher, in Chile, Iceland and Estonia.
His most well known policy is that of monetarism which involved governments controlling and increasing the volume of money available in the system as a means of achieving continuing economic growth rather than reflecting gold reserve and other physical assets. However this was not an end in itself but a means to an end which was to achieve economic stability and growth. Although the communist and socialist orientated economics achieved some degree of stability there was a tendency for the economies to stagnate, and for inflation from increasing wage demands. The system encouraged conformity and regulation but the issues of freedom and morality are not, in my view inherent with one system or another but related to human nature and historical and cultural backgrounds and the way all governments behave and those within governmental system who have authority and therefore power over others.
A second feature of his approach was the belief that for an economy to flourish there had to be a natural level of unemployment as enterprises opened and closed, as workers failed to fit or needed to move. I am not sure if he argued that in employment systems controlled by government at and national level with large public sector workforces and where government were significantly influenced or controlled by trade unions, keeping the job and pressing for higher wages became an object in itself rather than a means to an end. The services developed their own culture and power structure which was often very different from the official management hierarchy, became conservative, self protecting, inwardly looking and resistant to change whether it was good or bad.
I have unique experience in relation to British Local government having worked in various capacities from office junior, probationer professional, student supervision, staff supervisor, middle and senior managements both operational and as a staff officer in planning, development and recruitments and then as a chief officer as part of various forms of management teams under different political structures, working in some of the largest local authority departments, and one of the smallest. in a County Borough, London Borough and Metropolitan Borough in two large cities and in continues, rural and cutting edge in management terms (Middlesex County Council, Croydon Borough Council, Manchester City Council, Birmingham City Council, Norfolk County Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Ealing London Borough, West Riding County Council, Cheshire County Council, South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council and Sunderland Metropolitan Borough Council). I also held positions on Committee and attended training and conferences which enabled contact and insight into what happened elsewhere, including in one instance obtain detailed account of the political and management structure of every Children’s Department in the UK. I also had knowledge of the corresponding health authorities, especially through four visits made as part of the DHSS Drug Advisory Service, and through membership of the Local Authority Forum on services for Drug users including visits to various areas and their services. By the mid 1980’s it was evident that radical changes were required if public services were able to cope with the changes required by changing economic and social conditions. I wrote a paper after attending an international senior management course which the sometime Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party circulated around Whitehall and I also contributed a paper to inquiries covering the welfare system and pension provision concerned at the creation of a self perpetuating underclass class. I was also critical of change for the sake of change or because of fashion and a great believer in the maxim if it works don’t try and fix it, clashing with government and colleagues around 1990 over attempts to introduce a flawed community care system and flawed changes to legislation involving children in public care and their families.
The problem of whole industries coming to an end, shipbuilding and coal mining, and steel making to a considerable extent, and then manufacturing such as clothes or cars, more recently toys and electronic goods, to developing new economies is the impact just not on individuals and their families but entire communities and their culture.
So while I shared the Friedman view about the need for managerial change and for reform of the welfare state system, particularly the benefits structure and the way he national health service as operating with management and administration, the medical services and the nursing and allied services in compartmentalised structures, I was and remain opposed to the privatisation of the NHS and the introduction of medical insurance. I had an open mind about education which again appeared to have become compartmentalised between public and private education and between those going to university and those who did not,
Although he had undertaken graduate work at the University of Chicago, it was not until after World War II and in his mid thirties that he moved to Chicago to teach economic theory and was to remain for the next 30 years establishing what became known world wide as the Chicago school. And it was from here that he was to have the greatest effect on one national economy and this was Chile. There are two sides to the Chilean story and Presidents Allende and Pinochet
I will leave for another day what happened in Chile during the 1970’s except that to signal my understanding that Allende was a man of high principles and ideals who tried to create a genuine socialist state without the usual repressive measures and had to cope with the support of Russia and Castro one hand with their own agenda’s and the USA and the CIA supporting oppositions and undermining everything he attempted to do. When attempts to stop Allende gaining power through a democratic election failed the USA concentrated on getting the Military to launch a coup and American Corporations with holdings in Chile gave money to the CIA to assist in its operations.
There is also evidence that General Pinochet was ruthless in torturing and get rid of political opponents and those considered a threat whether they were or not. It also has to be said that regardless of the reason the Chilean economy after a promising start began to deteriorate beyond control with inflation rising to 140% and the economy going into depression at minus 5.8 percent. It is also true that a visit of Friedman and the appointment of his former pupils in key position did bring about a fundamental change in the Chilean economy for the better reducing the percentage of the poor in the population to the lowest in South America. One of the reported most successful aspects was the move from state to private pension funds, with the individual made the stake holder and the pension went with them through changes in employment.
In the programme this led back to its central theme of how to achieve a growing stable economy with a decontrolled capitalist system in which the individual were protected “ insured” against its worse excesses. This led to the developments covered yesterday of the move from trading in stocks and in stock futures and then into commodities and currencies and then in futures, and the creation of private equity funds which bought and sold increasingly large corporations, selling off the inefficient and less profitable parts, streamlining managements and severe pruning cost structures, and then the development of investments funds which concentrated on using all available markets to buy and sell the same stocks, commodities and currencies at the same time, Hedging, and using complex mathematical based computer programmes which stored every piece of information on the markets and on trades made with continual analysis, creating new billionaires, paying senior executives millions of dollars in bonuses and giving investors major returns
However then with Enron, the collapse of Lehman brothers, the virtual collapse of AIG an insurance giant who went into the Hedge funding in a major way the question is asked why did the bubble burst. The programme has not answered this yet and I have read insufficient the Peston book, but my present understanding is that the problem rests with the Friedman belief in cutting back on all controls and regulators and my own experience that in any field you do this and you create great harm for significant sections of the particular population, whether children in care or under supervision, psychiatric patients in hospital, or those undertaking complex computerised trading involving millions and billions. I believe it was one Enron executive or in the AIG trading arm or sub prime dealings who argued that having any asset base was irrelevant, the important issue was to concentrate on the creation of trades, profits and individual wealth.
This all takes me back when I finished top of the Olivetti sales training course of some forty or more individuals, many experienced salesmen from office supply outlets but failed to sell one standard office machine course during the five to six months I was in the sales office because the method advocated and carried out by the successful salesmen and supervisors were alien to me, During this time there was criticism of the amount of expenses and this continued for sometime until a senior employee parted company when it was discovered he had been altering claims and pocketing the differences.
The most outstanding fact to date is that those involved in the hedge fund trading I assume world wide had control of 596 trillion dollars over 40 times the size of the USA economy.
In the fourth programme of the Ascent of Money viewed, the penultimate of the series, Professor Fergusson explained how the Credit Crunch was precipitated by the decision of President Bush to promote the idea of a property owning democracy to those on the other side of the tracks, some 5.3 million news home owners previously considered not suitable for mortgage loans. Professor Fergusson commenced the programme by explaining that in the UK there were a comparatively small number of aristocratic families who owned most of the land in the UK and that even today there are some 200000 families owning the greater proportion of the land area of the UK. By 1939 less than one third of the population owned their own homes and even in the USA one two in five owned their homes in the early 1920’s. I still remember the surprise when attending a social gathering for a party of a federal, state and county official from the USA who came on a visit to Cheshire as part of a review of the development of Social Services Departments in the UK and who explained how it was possible to limit and avoid the payment of federal taxes by investing in property to rent for the poorer members of the community. It was only with the great crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression that families began to default on their mortgages and their rent that the New Deal was developed in which property owning was extended but predominantly to those who were white, creating white and black segregated districts, because it was considered that the non whites were unacceptable risks. At that time and in the UK the pattern was for long term 20-25 year mortgage loans where the capital was paid off alongside the interest or as in my situation an insurance scheme was also taken out which paid off the capital at the end of the loan period and which also gained bonuses and which in my instance resulted in a payment of over twice the original loan and which was greater than the interest paid in money terms although I never got round to calculating the exact amounts in terms of inflation over the 20 years of the mortgage. However during the period of home ownership commencing in 1967 a property then costing £5000 in London rose two £7500 when sold less than three years later to £21000 by the early 1970’s and £640000 2004. I had bought a property for £7500 in 1971 which was sold for £15000 in 1974 and the property then bought later that year increased 17 fold by the time of its sale thirty years later.
However the idea that it was only after the Millennium that the mortgage market in the USA went mad is mistaken for whenever federal money had been made available or financial initiatives to help people in need there will been those who will exploit and divert for personal gain and advancement. However this time it has been the scale and the way the market has become interlocked. When president Bush signalled the need to extend property owning to those previously prevented from being given long term and comparatively low interest loans, it has to be assumed he was not aware what would happen in practice and how the situation would dramatically change.
This contrasted with the decision of Margaret Thatcher who in the 1980, enabled hundreds of thousands to buy their council houses with allowance made for the years of previous rent payments, so that they were able to take out smaller loans than the value of their properties and with interest and repayments spread over a period of years they paid out less than they had as rent. But even in these situations basic checks were made on income and the ability to meet the requirement repayments.
The second difference is that those who were dependent on state welfare benefit were excluded as their rent and council taxes were paid directly by the state rather than themselves where as in the USA the Bush scheme was applied to the NINJA, No income, No Jobs and no Assets. The second problem is that they were given pay interest only loans which meant that as soon as interest increased then the loans were quickly in default. The problems for those who had loaned the money is that the asset had also dropped in value so if it was repossessed and sold it realised less than the value of the original loan. This meant that in addition to losing homes there was a book debt with no means of repaying. This was bad enough but the loans had already been sold and resold as part of complex hedge funding so that the debt was often held not just by major banks here in the UK and elsewhere n the world but by local authorities in places such as Finland and England.
Earlier I mentioned the apparently successful involvement of Milton Friedman with Chile. He was also an adviser to Iceland. Meanwhile the bombs drop on Hamas controlled Palestine and the Hamas rockets fly into Israel. I was tempted to close with Happy New Year but remembered the first of a two part programme about a return visit to Libya by broadcaster Peter Snow who fifty years ago between the ages of thirteen and fifteen lived in the county where his father was garrison commander. Although those interviewed did not disguise their hatred from the colonial fascist oppression by Italians prior to World War 2 compared to the strategic post war presence by Britain. Italian tourists were now welcome as Libya attempted to re-establish itself as part of the international community. Never say never and as in Northern Ireland that Ian paisley sat down in the same building as part of a government with former supporters of the IRA one should never say or not expect the unexpected.
New Years proved a great time with three excellent end of years shows on the telly, including the vest Jools Holland party and the best Thames side fireworks todate and some great food and new and old friend saying hullo on MySpace. But bombs and the rockets are still falling and hundred of thousands are about to lose their jobs if they have not already, and some their homes. I hope 2009 is not going to be as bad as I fear.
The idea of insurance for the individual against tragedies and unforeseen circumstances only commenced in the UK, in Scotland, by a group of clergymen after 1800. The had developed a system of contributing to a fund to meet the needs of widowed parishioners and decided it would a good idea to raise money beforehand, create a fund and use interest to provide assistance, and they worked out the likely number of widows in the future to establish how much they needed to contribute. This developed into the Scottish Widows fund and which continued to exist as a separate mutual body only until recently when if became part of the Lloyds TSB empire. In discussing the subject mention was made that in the UK people insure more than elsewhere, although we are said to be one of the safest countries on the planet, not withstanding the floodings over the over the past couple of years.
In the UK we also tend to believe that outside the former Communist countries we were the first to develop a comprehensive state system of welfare to protect everyone in times of need. The programme argued that in fact it was Japan who developed such a system, originally to create its fighting force providing support for the widows and their children. It is now Japan that is facing the biggest crisis because of the increasing imbalance between those in work and those needing help, especially in relation to its aging population where the country became the first where the elderly commenced to live increasingly longer. The programme did not say why this has happened but I speculate that this is to do with the diet, especially the emphasis on fish and the self discipline and work ethic which results in people being active and not overweight.
The programme then examined the move away from welfarism which commenced not in the USA or with Thatcher in the UK but with Pinochet in Chile under the influence of Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman who died aged 94 in 2006 started as advocate of John Maynard Keynes the economist also favoured at Ruskin with his approach to welfare economics within a capitalist framework. As with all creative thinkers who challenged existing orthodoxy there is a tendency to reject or adopt everything without first testing, evaluation, and then accepting, rejecting or modifying. There is also a tendency to construct a political as well as economic system and then a moral framework. Thus his main work on Capitalism and Freedom made connections and associations which were dangerous as we are now experiencing. His approach was understandable as was the way his approach was taken up by President Regan and Thatcher, in Chile, Iceland and Estonia.
His most well known policy is that of monetarism which involved governments controlling and increasing the volume of money available in the system as a means of achieving continuing economic growth rather than reflecting gold reserve and other physical assets. However this was not an end in itself but a means to an end which was to achieve economic stability and growth. Although the communist and socialist orientated economics achieved some degree of stability there was a tendency for the economies to stagnate, and for inflation from increasing wage demands. The system encouraged conformity and regulation but the issues of freedom and morality are not, in my view inherent with one system or another but related to human nature and historical and cultural backgrounds and the way all governments behave and those within governmental system who have authority and therefore power over others.
A second feature of his approach was the belief that for an economy to flourish there had to be a natural level of unemployment as enterprises opened and closed, as workers failed to fit or needed to move. I am not sure if he argued that in employment systems controlled by government at and national level with large public sector workforces and where government were significantly influenced or controlled by trade unions, keeping the job and pressing for higher wages became an object in itself rather than a means to an end. The services developed their own culture and power structure which was often very different from the official management hierarchy, became conservative, self protecting, inwardly looking and resistant to change whether it was good or bad.
I have unique experience in relation to British Local government having worked in various capacities from office junior, probationer professional, student supervision, staff supervisor, middle and senior managements both operational and as a staff officer in planning, development and recruitments and then as a chief officer as part of various forms of management teams under different political structures, working in some of the largest local authority departments, and one of the smallest. in a County Borough, London Borough and Metropolitan Borough in two large cities and in continues, rural and cutting edge in management terms (Middlesex County Council, Croydon Borough Council, Manchester City Council, Birmingham City Council, Norfolk County Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Ealing London Borough, West Riding County Council, Cheshire County Council, South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council and Sunderland Metropolitan Borough Council). I also held positions on Committee and attended training and conferences which enabled contact and insight into what happened elsewhere, including in one instance obtain detailed account of the political and management structure of every Children’s Department in the UK. I also had knowledge of the corresponding health authorities, especially through four visits made as part of the DHSS Drug Advisory Service, and through membership of the Local Authority Forum on services for Drug users including visits to various areas and their services. By the mid 1980’s it was evident that radical changes were required if public services were able to cope with the changes required by changing economic and social conditions. I wrote a paper after attending an international senior management course which the sometime Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party circulated around Whitehall and I also contributed a paper to inquiries covering the welfare system and pension provision concerned at the creation of a self perpetuating underclass class. I was also critical of change for the sake of change or because of fashion and a great believer in the maxim if it works don’t try and fix it, clashing with government and colleagues around 1990 over attempts to introduce a flawed community care system and flawed changes to legislation involving children in public care and their families.
The problem of whole industries coming to an end, shipbuilding and coal mining, and steel making to a considerable extent, and then manufacturing such as clothes or cars, more recently toys and electronic goods, to developing new economies is the impact just not on individuals and their families but entire communities and their culture.
So while I shared the Friedman view about the need for managerial change and for reform of the welfare state system, particularly the benefits structure and the way he national health service as operating with management and administration, the medical services and the nursing and allied services in compartmentalised structures, I was and remain opposed to the privatisation of the NHS and the introduction of medical insurance. I had an open mind about education which again appeared to have become compartmentalised between public and private education and between those going to university and those who did not,
Although he had undertaken graduate work at the University of Chicago, it was not until after World War II and in his mid thirties that he moved to Chicago to teach economic theory and was to remain for the next 30 years establishing what became known world wide as the Chicago school. And it was from here that he was to have the greatest effect on one national economy and this was Chile. There are two sides to the Chilean story and Presidents Allende and Pinochet
I will leave for another day what happened in Chile during the 1970’s except that to signal my understanding that Allende was a man of high principles and ideals who tried to create a genuine socialist state without the usual repressive measures and had to cope with the support of Russia and Castro one hand with their own agenda’s and the USA and the CIA supporting oppositions and undermining everything he attempted to do. When attempts to stop Allende gaining power through a democratic election failed the USA concentrated on getting the Military to launch a coup and American Corporations with holdings in Chile gave money to the CIA to assist in its operations.
There is also evidence that General Pinochet was ruthless in torturing and get rid of political opponents and those considered a threat whether they were or not. It also has to be said that regardless of the reason the Chilean economy after a promising start began to deteriorate beyond control with inflation rising to 140% and the economy going into depression at minus 5.8 percent. It is also true that a visit of Friedman and the appointment of his former pupils in key position did bring about a fundamental change in the Chilean economy for the better reducing the percentage of the poor in the population to the lowest in South America. One of the reported most successful aspects was the move from state to private pension funds, with the individual made the stake holder and the pension went with them through changes in employment.
In the programme this led back to its central theme of how to achieve a growing stable economy with a decontrolled capitalist system in which the individual were protected “ insured” against its worse excesses. This led to the developments covered yesterday of the move from trading in stocks and in stock futures and then into commodities and currencies and then in futures, and the creation of private equity funds which bought and sold increasingly large corporations, selling off the inefficient and less profitable parts, streamlining managements and severe pruning cost structures, and then the development of investments funds which concentrated on using all available markets to buy and sell the same stocks, commodities and currencies at the same time, Hedging, and using complex mathematical based computer programmes which stored every piece of information on the markets and on trades made with continual analysis, creating new billionaires, paying senior executives millions of dollars in bonuses and giving investors major returns
However then with Enron, the collapse of Lehman brothers, the virtual collapse of AIG an insurance giant who went into the Hedge funding in a major way the question is asked why did the bubble burst. The programme has not answered this yet and I have read insufficient the Peston book, but my present understanding is that the problem rests with the Friedman belief in cutting back on all controls and regulators and my own experience that in any field you do this and you create great harm for significant sections of the particular population, whether children in care or under supervision, psychiatric patients in hospital, or those undertaking complex computerised trading involving millions and billions. I believe it was one Enron executive or in the AIG trading arm or sub prime dealings who argued that having any asset base was irrelevant, the important issue was to concentrate on the creation of trades, profits and individual wealth.
This all takes me back when I finished top of the Olivetti sales training course of some forty or more individuals, many experienced salesmen from office supply outlets but failed to sell one standard office machine course during the five to six months I was in the sales office because the method advocated and carried out by the successful salesmen and supervisors were alien to me, During this time there was criticism of the amount of expenses and this continued for sometime until a senior employee parted company when it was discovered he had been altering claims and pocketing the differences.
The most outstanding fact to date is that those involved in the hedge fund trading I assume world wide had control of 596 trillion dollars over 40 times the size of the USA economy.
In the fourth programme of the Ascent of Money viewed, the penultimate of the series, Professor Fergusson explained how the Credit Crunch was precipitated by the decision of President Bush to promote the idea of a property owning democracy to those on the other side of the tracks, some 5.3 million news home owners previously considered not suitable for mortgage loans. Professor Fergusson commenced the programme by explaining that in the UK there were a comparatively small number of aristocratic families who owned most of the land in the UK and that even today there are some 200000 families owning the greater proportion of the land area of the UK. By 1939 less than one third of the population owned their own homes and even in the USA one two in five owned their homes in the early 1920’s. I still remember the surprise when attending a social gathering for a party of a federal, state and county official from the USA who came on a visit to Cheshire as part of a review of the development of Social Services Departments in the UK and who explained how it was possible to limit and avoid the payment of federal taxes by investing in property to rent for the poorer members of the community. It was only with the great crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression that families began to default on their mortgages and their rent that the New Deal was developed in which property owning was extended but predominantly to those who were white, creating white and black segregated districts, because it was considered that the non whites were unacceptable risks. At that time and in the UK the pattern was for long term 20-25 year mortgage loans where the capital was paid off alongside the interest or as in my situation an insurance scheme was also taken out which paid off the capital at the end of the loan period and which also gained bonuses and which in my instance resulted in a payment of over twice the original loan and which was greater than the interest paid in money terms although I never got round to calculating the exact amounts in terms of inflation over the 20 years of the mortgage. However during the period of home ownership commencing in 1967 a property then costing £5000 in London rose two £7500 when sold less than three years later to £21000 by the early 1970’s and £640000 2004. I had bought a property for £7500 in 1971 which was sold for £15000 in 1974 and the property then bought later that year increased 17 fold by the time of its sale thirty years later.
However the idea that it was only after the Millennium that the mortgage market in the USA went mad is mistaken for whenever federal money had been made available or financial initiatives to help people in need there will been those who will exploit and divert for personal gain and advancement. However this time it has been the scale and the way the market has become interlocked. When president Bush signalled the need to extend property owning to those previously prevented from being given long term and comparatively low interest loans, it has to be assumed he was not aware what would happen in practice and how the situation would dramatically change.
This contrasted with the decision of Margaret Thatcher who in the 1980, enabled hundreds of thousands to buy their council houses with allowance made for the years of previous rent payments, so that they were able to take out smaller loans than the value of their properties and with interest and repayments spread over a period of years they paid out less than they had as rent. But even in these situations basic checks were made on income and the ability to meet the requirement repayments.
The second difference is that those who were dependent on state welfare benefit were excluded as their rent and council taxes were paid directly by the state rather than themselves where as in the USA the Bush scheme was applied to the NINJA, No income, No Jobs and no Assets. The second problem is that they were given pay interest only loans which meant that as soon as interest increased then the loans were quickly in default. The problems for those who had loaned the money is that the asset had also dropped in value so if it was repossessed and sold it realised less than the value of the original loan. This meant that in addition to losing homes there was a book debt with no means of repaying. This was bad enough but the loans had already been sold and resold as part of complex hedge funding so that the debt was often held not just by major banks here in the UK and elsewhere n the world but by local authorities in places such as Finland and England.
Earlier I mentioned the apparently successful involvement of Milton Friedman with Chile. He was also an adviser to Iceland. Meanwhile the bombs drop on Hamas controlled Palestine and the Hamas rockets fly into Israel. I was tempted to close with Happy New Year but remembered the first of a two part programme about a return visit to Libya by broadcaster Peter Snow who fifty years ago between the ages of thirteen and fifteen lived in the county where his father was garrison commander. Although those interviewed did not disguise their hatred from the colonial fascist oppression by Italians prior to World War 2 compared to the strategic post war presence by Britain. Italian tourists were now welcome as Libya attempted to re-establish itself as part of the international community. Never say never and as in Northern Ireland that Ian paisley sat down in the same building as part of a government with former supporters of the IRA one should never say or not expect the unexpected.
New Years proved a great time with three excellent end of years shows on the telly, including the vest Jools Holland party and the best Thames side fireworks todate and some great food and new and old friend saying hullo on MySpace. But bombs and the rockets are still falling and hundred of thousands are about to lose their jobs if they have not already, and some their homes. I hope 2009 is not going to be as bad as I fear.
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