Credit Reference agencies - How on earth can we trust them?

So, the other week, Standard & Poor, one of the largest credit reference agencies in the world, downgraded the outlook on US debt. What does that mean?

It, a private company, told the most powerful nation in the world to change its fiscal policy. I can guarantee that S&P making that statement will have more impact on US policy than any or all of the opposition to any US policy in the last 20 years.

Which must make it frustrating to be, for example, Hugo Chavez.



Above: He wishes he was a credit reference agency (Hugo, not the parrot)

The US isn't the first country to suffer from credit scrutiny. The Portuguese & Irish crises were exacerbated by ill-timed rating downgrades; the British government has been running scared from these agencies since 2007. Why are they so powerful? How many aircraft carriers do they have?

In 1996, Tom Friedman said "There are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. There's the United States and there's Moody's Bond Rating Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody's can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. And believe me, it's not clear sometimes who's more powerful."

It wasn't always like this

At the start of the twentieth century John Moody, a former journalist with an entrepreneurial streak, saw a gap in the finance market. Investors too often bought on trust because they were in the dark about credit quality. Moody set about publishing information on stocks and bonds to help them.

The business grew but Moody’s maintained its founder’s hawkish devotion to accuracy and steadfast focus on investors’ long-term interests. It was renowned for erring on the side of caution when assessing risk and turned work down if it didn’t meet its lofty standards. If anything, the institution saw itself as a public servant.

Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s – among the handful of agencies approved by the American regulator – grew to dominate the bond rating market. By the 1970s the financial sector had become more complex, increasing the agencies’ costs, so they began charging issuers as well as investors for rating services. But this shift laid the foundations for the massive conflict of interest that would later undermine the rating agencies’ integrity.

The idea is, they provide investors with objective and trustworthy guidance. Perfectly above board. But there is a huge conflict of interest that results from the agencies being paid by the issuers of the debt

The fact that major financial institutions only trusted Moody’s and S&P to rate significant issues created a dangerous duopoly: most deals required two ratings. “We had no competition and a steady stream of work,” recalled a senior ex-Moody’s managing director. “It was perfect. I used to think to myself ‘there’s no way we can screw this up’.”

In the mid-1990s this duopoly was broken by the emergence of Fitch. An injection of private equity investment had propelled Fitch, previously a minor player, into becoming a serious rival.

Moody’s were still keeping to the judicious values of their founder. Under corporate chief Tom McGuire, an ex-Jesuit priest, Moody’s culture remained pure. Analysts didn't enter dialogue with bankers and certainly didn’t return calls from the people they were analysing.

But the entrance of Fitch had turned the market on its head. Keen to expand its market share, Fitch was happy to co-operate with issuers’ needs. This shift, in turn, encouraged S&P to be more accommodating. In contrast, issuers saw Moody’s as arrogant and inflexible and it began to lag behind the competition. In 1996, Fitch and S&P rated five times more commercial mortgage-backed securities’ deals than Moody’s.

Moody’s brought in a management consultant to try and fix its woes, and in the resultant shake-up, Tom McGuire departed along with other top people.

This created an opening for a clutch of senior players within Moody’s who argued it should pursue a more profit-focused direction. The company, they figured, possessed a first-rate brand and, in times of plenty, should cash in. The advocates for change argued that Moody’s should develop more amicable relations with Wall Street and increase the number of deals it rated.

The management of the company was gradually wrestled away from older staffers who clung to its former values; the new school’s victory was sealed in September 2000 when it took the company public. Being held by shareholders created yet another pressure - Moody’s now faced short-term pressures to demonstrate earnings growth.

Moody’s dialogue with Wall Street improved. But this exchange of information gradually became a negotiation as the last vestiges of Moody’s old culture were broken down. It became normal in structured finance deals for analysts to tell issuers what they needed to reach investment grade, and analysts grew accustomed to tweaking the requirements on a deal a little to keep a banker happy.

The banks began playing the rating agencies off one another and shopping around to see who would rate an issue more favourably. Former Moody’s Asia structured finance chief Ann Rutledge told me in 2008: “An analyst would help the banker that was issuing the debt by relaxing the constraints on the deal a tiny bit. But the impact on the rating could be huge.”

The effect, as the big three agencies fought to hold onto market share, was that thousands of deals were put together with costly levels of investor protection reduced. This corner cutting was exposed when the wheels came off the US housing market, sparking hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of losses on under-collateralised debt.

How it all went wrong

Here's a good example of how the process went wrong: in the late-90s a Miami-based company freight company sought to borrow $140 million against 14 aeroplanes. Unfortunately the numbers didn’t work. The notes backed by the planes only rated as triple-C, or non-investment grade. This meant the deal could not fly.

To resurrect the transaction, the triple-C ratings would have to be raised to triple-B. “A leap, in order of magnitude, equivalent to turning a Robin Reliant into a BMW,” recalls a former Moody's analyst who worked on the deal.

To get around the problem, Moody’s extended the predicted useful life of the 14 planes from the normal 25 years to 100 years to generate more cash flow. Moody's simply redefined the longevity of an aeroplane to generate the right rating.

This shift in standards might have mattered little if it had only affected the shelf life of a few aeroplanes. But, from 2002 onwards, structured finance witnessed the rapid rise of the collateralised debt obligation. By 2006 CDO issues topped half a trillion dollars. CDOs’ opaque methodology took already sliced-up bonds and sliced them up further into new tranches based on risk and return. This meant certain tranches could be rated triple-A despite the fact that lots of sub-prime mortgages had been squeezed into the overall package.

And we all know how that turned out.

In the financial crisis, the three big credit reference agencies - Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch - bungled the grading of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of debt with catastrophic results for the entire world's economy.

How can we trust them any more? Are they to blame for the credit crunch and the subsequent worldwide recession? The banks share some of the blame, obviously, as well as useless financial regulators - however, while equally culpable, the big three credit rating agencies seem to have gotten off scot-free, and are again on the rampage.

Following the 2007 disaster, the incoming administration in Washington vowed to address the ratings system. The EU meanwhile announced its intention to directly regulate ratings agencies for the first time. Other countries vowed to set up independent domestic agencies to reduce reliance on the big three. But this hasn't changed anything. Pressure from the ratings agencies has meant all that has come to naught.

Exactly the same underlying conflicts of interest that damned the CDO market are present in their ratings of sovereign debt; for example, in March Greek debt was downgraded. The cuts to the ratings help to push up the cost of borrowing for Greece on the international bond markets. That means all kinds of people increase their margins of profit - not least the reference agencies.

The truth is, the global financial system hinges on the accuracy of the credit rating agencies. As a result, these bodies are, it seems, totally unaccountable. And that can't be good for anyone. Even Hugo Chavez.

Breast of Lamb de Foret Bourlon - a 1930s recipe for an unrated cut of meat

Breast of lamb is a strange joint which is pretty nearly inedible.

Well, if you believe common wisdom, anyway!

It's a bit of the sheep most supermarket's won't sell because there's hardly any meat on it. It is a thin strip about 2 feet long and 6 inches wide and includes a big wedge of fat at the top and the lower part of the ribs back to the belly. The breast of lamb is the giveaway cut of the animal (in some butchers shops literally), yet most British cooks these days have probably never got to grips with one.

It can be delicious, if you cook it right.



This recipe was passed on to me by my grandma, and originally came from a letter to a newspaper - the original recipe contains wonderful moments like "It is very cheap - breast of English Lamb was 8d a pound in Harrods last Saturday - one often finds cheaper cuts of a better class in an upscale butcher than in a so-called cheap one - but beware, this is not a dish for the ten-minute cook."

This is still true, but trust me, it's worth the effort, if only to confound expectations.

Breast of lamb de Foret Bourlon

1 breast of lamb
2 carrots, sliced
2 onions, sliced
a glass of white wine
a glass of water
a sprig of rosemary, or thyme, or both
salt, fresh ground black pepper

to finish:
mustard
one egg, beaten
dried breadcrumbs
100g butter, melted

Dipping Sauce:

Harissa Aioli (Mayonnaise, mixed with Garlic & Harissa paste)

Recipe:

Place the breast of lamb in an oven-proof dish or casserole, cut into two halves if necessary to fit, with the carrots, onions and herbs scattered under and over it and the wine and water poured over. Season well with salt and pepper and cover the dish with foil (or its lid).

Bake in an oven preheated to 140ºC for two and half to three hours, removing the dish to turn and baste the breast two or three times, until the meat is completely tender.

As soon as the meat is cool enough to handle, slip the rib bones out of the meat by tugging gently with your fingers. Retain the bones to scare any young relatives and/or to convince your neighbours you are killing children.

Press the boneless breasts between two chopping boards, or two flat plates, with a weight on top (a few full jam jars or large tomato tins will do). Leave in the fridge for a couple of hours, or overnight.

To finish the dish, slice the cold, pressed breast meat into two-finger width, one-finger length slices. Brush the slices with a little mustard, dip in beaten egg, and press firmly into a bowl of breadcrumbs so they are well coated.

Arrange in a roasting tin, brush each with a little melted butter, and place in the centre of an oven pre-heated to 180º C. After 15 minutes, whack the oven up to maximum heat, to get them very crisp.

Serve on hot plates, to waiting guests, with a piquant sauce to dip them in, such as a harissa aioli (Sounds complex but is really just mayo added to harissa - mess around with it a bit to get it to taste).

To make this a meal, rather than a starter or snack, extend the accompaniments to a creamy mash and a salad.

AV - Why yes, & why no

As a media type interested in politics, I follow campaigning with both professional & personal interest.

The campaigns for Yes & No on AV have been absolutely abominable. The No to AV campaign, while slickly run, has focussed on total lies & distortions of the truth.

For example, have a look at this video by No to AV:



Amusing, yes. But all the facts suggest that AV will lead to less coalitions, not more. The No campaign, from this video to the "CUTE BABIES AND RUGGED SOLDIERS WILL DIE UNDER AV" has been lurching from one random scaremonger after another. It wouldn't last real, sustained intellectual challenge (but more on why that hasn't happened later).

In my opinion, there's plenty to not like about AV, without resorting to this sort of thing. I am voting yes (mostly because I want a real proportional system, not this half-arsed fudge) - but I am only voting yes because I don't want electoral reform to be buried for a generation.

AV is a shit system.

1.) It's not proportional. You can look at Australian outcomes to see that. Indeed, it's often more outrageous than FPTP (see analysis of Blair's 1997 election).

In about 1/3rd of seats, the safe Labour/Tory strongholds, you get a 50% majority without any 2nd prefs even being counted, as more than half the turnout will be for the sitting MP. Probably a real mandate, but a pisser for everyone in the other 49%.

So...it doesn't get rid of safe seats at all, one of the main reasons to supposedly support it.

2.) The system is far from transparent, and leads to enormous resentment as people can't understand why "their" candidate lost to someone less popular - see entire Labour party baffled by election of Ed Milliband, and in theory most of them understand the system.



The no campaign could literally run pictures of Ed Miliband marked "RESULT OF AV" and win on that alone.

3.) It also makes it harder for excellent but divisive people like Caroline Lucas or Douglas Carswell to get elected, as the "anyone but them" vote is bolstered tremendously by the stacking effect AV gives. For the record, Lucas was elected on 30% of the vote in Brighton; "Greens unlikely to win again" is hardly an advert for "AV helps small parties".

It also makes it all but impossible to elect the occasional oddball single issue MP like Martin Bell.

4.) The "50% mandate" is entirely illusory.I question whether the combo of say, liberal votes going to Labour represents a pro-labour mandate or an anti-tory mandate - and in my mind, there is a big difference, but not one reflected in policy.

5.) The most electorally representative seats - the third of seats that are three way marginals we'd all like to see more of - basically get abolished, and probably turn into Liberal/Labour swing seats, disenfranchising loads of people. And yes, if you want a Tory, could reasonably expect a Tory and are forced to have a liberal you are being disenfranchised by the new system.

Of course, with the ramping up of anti-libdem "traitor" rhetoric from Labour (my personal favourite of which was Mark Thomas saying this week that he "finds it astounding that Nick Clegg can wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and not put a gun in his mouth" - harsh), that may change, disadvantaging Labour.

6.) It effectively reintroduces plural voting - with some voters influencing the democratic process 4, 5, or 6 times, and others doing so only once. If you don't believe me, then wait until you see canvassers giving out australian style "preference cards" at the polling booth, telling you how best to vote to aid your chosen party. So, the claim that AV "eliminates tactical voting" is nonsense - it just means people will vote tactically in a different way.

The people who vote for small parties *are* influencing the democratic process more than once, because they are contributing to the elimination of a party during one round, and then having their vote reallocated the next.

So you can vote Green to try to make sure the BNP come last and are thus eliminated. You have then knocked out the BNP and prevented them gaining any more reallocated votes. Your vote can then be transfered to - say - Labour, and you then get to help them win the seat.

Another voter - who just plumps for Labour - does not get that ability to influence the democratic process more than once. You've thus had more voting power than someone else

I'm uncomfortable with the fact that the truly decisive votes - especially in seats where one candidate currently gets between 40 and 50 % - are the second/third/fourth/fifth preference votes of the most unpopular parties. We hand the casting votes in our system to the BNP voter - or alternatively to the ultimate tactical voters, gaming the system. Either is bad.

7.) BABIES WILL DIE, but I'd also like to point out that rugged soldiers will not get body armour or guns, as all the money will be poured into biro ink caused by the endless, endless, box checking.

Despite all of the "Kittens will die" rhetoric, the yes campaign has been even worse.

From it's total failure to connect with the public, squabbles over Nick Clegg "sharing platforms", airbrushing Benjamin Zephaniah out of its inner city leaflets , to failing to garner official spokespeople to do debates it has been probably the most shambolic political campaign in the last twenty years. As a media professional, it's actually embarrassing to watch.

On the other hand, as a Tory, watching a campaign mishandled so badly by Labour & the Libdems, is reassuring to watch. Letting enfeebled remanant of the Labour election team in the Millibunker dictate the campaign is akin raising Barbara Cartland from the grave and then putting her in charge of government make-up policy.

So, after that screed of "No to AV", why do I think we should vote yes?

1.)It's an incremental step to a better, fairer voting system - it will allow the democratic process to more accurately reflect the will of the people, to a greater degree than now at least.

2.) I think one or two elections under AV will produce a non-proportional result which will make the case for moving on to a better system stronger. I think AV moves toward entrenching the idea that proportionality is good, and it (a poor system) won't last that meme becoming established.

3.) I think a "no" vote will make the real opponents of proportionality (the rotten borough Labour MPs, especially in Scotland & the hunter-shooter racist homophobic shires Tories) dig in and say "the people voted no". It'll be 20 years before we even get something as half-arsed as AV on the table again.

4.) It will abolish *some* safe seats, which I see as a good thing. Safe seats often entrench the most awful people in political parties (Hazel Blears is a good example), and in many seats, the momentum of revulsion will carry off these loathsome toads. The best current example of this is that under AV, Ed Balls would almost certainly lose his ultra-marginal seat. Which leads me to...

5.) An important one for me - Labour will lose the most from the introduction of AV. I think the poll I linked to even understates the consequences - especially in Wales & Scotland, the "anyone but Labour" vote is very strong. If you're a Tory like me, and think a return to a Labour government would be a catastrophe, then hey, this isn't a bad thing. AV lead to almost 20 years of tories in Australia...

That said,

6.) Whatever the impact on the main parties in the short run, it will be dwarfed by changes in how we *do* politics over the next 50 years, and that is genuinely exciting. The real effect of these changes won't appear until 2020 at the earliest - and a radical overhaul of politics sounds like a good thing, even if it takes a while.

7.) The first-past-the-post system may work under a two-party system, but we no longer have one. In 1951, 97% of voters voted for Labour or the Conservatives, but this figure was reduced to 66% in 2010.

We should have a voting system that takes account of the new political pluralism. The days of red or blue are dead. Accordingly, politicians should need to cultivate support from outside their traditional bases if they are to have a mandate to represent them. While this will not happen that much under AV – one-third of seats in 2010 were won with over 50% of the vote in any case – it will happen more, and it will reflect that large amounts of people hate both Labour AND the Tories.

Hardly a ringing endorsement, I realise, but the truth is no-one really wants AV for itself (including all six members of the Yes to AV steering committee). I dislike AV, but I think I dislike the status quo more.

This referendum is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for us to have our say on the current system. We should probably take it.

AV Burgers - comparing & contrasting.

Many years ago, I was poor. Not, weepy oh-i'm-so-poor-I-can-only-afford-one-holiday-a-year-poor, but proper, on the dole-but-calling-myself-a-freelancer poor. I think this experience probably had a big impact on my politics. While I didn't stop being a Tory, it did make me realise just how dependent on benefits people on benefits are; just how much difference 50p here or 50p there can make.

While going through this period, I learned to cook tasty things on a budget. Not a "budget" like £10 a meal - a budget like £5 to feed me for a week. I feel it's about time I shared a few of those tips.

One of my persistent beliefs, as best exemplified by Jamie Oliver's excellent Ministry of Food series, is that the world would be a better place if we all cooked more. Especially among the poorest people, a better understanding of how to cook would leave them (and crucially, their children) with more money, and better lives.

Now, most of my friends (especially my most patronising socialist friends) usually tell me:

1.) Working people don't have the time.
2.) Cooking is too hard for the average person.
3.) Cooking from fresh ingredients is too expensive compared to processed food or fast food.
4.) You and Jamie Oliver are both massive twats.

Now, I disagree with everything but 4.

I think especially in comparison with processed &/or fast food, you can feed a family cheaper & better by home cooking. I'm going to compare a Burger King Whopper with the kind of homemade burgers I learned to make when properly hard up.

The Burger King Whopper

We're all familiar with it, but in case you've forgotten what the grim things look like, here it is in all it's glory.



The whopper costs, in a meal with fries and a drink, an astonishing £6.49. I reckon I can produce a better result, with far more food, for far less cost. It's something of an unfair test - I imagine very few of the drastically poor eat at Burger king.

But that said, there is evidence that the poorest people are eating at takeaways rather than cooking - a situation we haven't really seen in this country since the 1920s.

AV Burgers

Much like the alternative vote, this meal isn't perfect - it's probably high in fat and so on. But, it is delicious, and almost certainly better for you than the alternative.

Ingredients (these are representative of the cheap version - if cooking & not on a budget, feel free to, for example, substitute any kind of mince, use red onions, etc)

400g of Sainsburies Value mince (£1.00)
One loose onion (20p)
One box of eggs (£1.65)
4 rolls (£1.00)
Iceberg lettuce (69p)
Sainsburies value Tomatoes (45p)
Bag of potatoes (£1)
200ml bottle of Best-in Vegetable oil (35p)
(Cost - £6.34)

Prep time:
15 mins prep,
30 mins cooking.



Recipe - Burgers, chips & salads

1. Chop the onion, add in the beef and break two eggs into the mixture. Mulch together with your hands, until a satisfying paste is formed. (If not doing it on a budget, add a pinch of salt & pepper, a dash of tobasco, a squeeze of ketchup and a mix of strong, woody herbs - I recommend thyme).

2. Scoop the beef into four discrete patties. Don't worry too much about regularity & shape - you're not winning a prize for aesthetics.

3. Heat oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Peel the potatoes and cut them into long chip shapes - the thickness you do is entirely up to you, though the width of your finger is ideal.(Unless you have really fat fingers). Rinse under the cold tap and pat dry with a tea towel.

4.Spread the chips on a baking tray and toss with oil. Lie them flat in a single layer, then bang them in the oven. Roast for 25-30 mins, turning now and then. When cooked they should be golden brown and crisp with a light fluffy centre.

5. Make the salad by roughly chopping half the lettuce, roughly chopping the tomatoes, and then tossing them together. If not on a budget, make some kind of pleasant dressing!

6. About ten minutes before the chips are ready, heat the oil to a moderate heat in a frying pan. Add the burgers to the pan. Fry them slowly, regularly turning them. Make sure they are cooked through before serving.

7. Pop the rolls in the oven for the last couple of minutes of the chips; serve on one plate with the salad, chips and so-on.

Voila! A kid-friendly meal, reasonably nutritious meal for 4 on the same budget as a BK whopper. When researching the costs for this, the extent of food inflation did hit me; when I was skint in 2003, I could do it (and lots of other pared-down meals) on about £4.

I did this experiment in 2007 originally, and by then we were up to just under £5. The jump in the prices of staples, especially eggs & bread, is pretty shocking.

Back in the Kitchen

Remember me?

You probably don't.

I've commited the ultimate in blogging crimes, I stopped blogging. I know, I know, the laws of blogging says you should engage with the online community, write pithy and interesting content regularly and refrain from libelous content. Was never good at the last one:)

I've still been writing & cooking, just not on here. But that's going to change. Starting from next week, I'm going to brush the dust off and get this bitch back on the road. Starting Friday 15th April! Continuing!

Facebook & the Pope's visit

There has been a great deal of froth about that pope fellow hasn't there? Personally, despite being the kind of "aggressive atheist" that the Pope's advisers are worried about, I think far too much of it has been anti-religious and anti-catholic rather than anti-pope.

(Note - I mean anti-pope, not antipope!)

Just look down your facebook newsfeed, and I'm sure there will be at least a couple of people spouting bile about the Pope's visit. Just to cheer you all up, here's the best linking of Facebook & the pope I've seen:



I've tried to be moderate - but to be fair I had a pretty snarky facebook status for Hu Jintao & King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz too and b.) I'm fairly sure my (anti-pope rather than anti catholic) FB status is something that even if Herr Ratzinger saw, he's probably say something like, "ACH, JAH, ZE ENGLANDER IS GANZ CORREKT! ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! SPITFEUER!!!"

Well, maybe not the last bit.

For a more erudite critique of the Pope's visit, I'd refer you to Hobbes' Leviathan:

.. from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

The language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

The fairies in what nation soever they converse have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.

The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms, have the power to make those towns, cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.

The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.

In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism; nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return; or rather, an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state. And this is all I had a design to say, concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS. Which, when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.


The above is of course courtesy of eminent materialist philosopher Will Jones Thomas Hobbes.

See you all for the resumption of normal service on Friday!

The Financial Crisis 2 - now in 3d!

In many ways we've learned nothing from this financial crisis - or indeed from any previous one. As a victim of Bernie Madoff, I was particularly enraged to see loathsome sleazy two bit fraudster Azil Nadir crawl out from under his Cypriot rock last week.



Above: A sleazy old pervert.

The above Pervert (Asil Nadir) was a major player in the City in the 1980s and early 1990s. He took a small east London textile firm called Polly Peck, and through a series of takeovers and canny deals he turned it into a serious conglomerate. It owned a slice of the Del Monte fruit canning brand, a majority stake in Japanese electronics company Sansui, and also owned companies making colour televisions and Betamax video recorders.

Wait, Betamax? The man from delmonte, he say, bad investment.

Still, like shoulderpads, hairspray, and movies with volleyball & fighter jets, it was all very, very impressive in the 1980s.



Above: Some things that looked good in the eighties look less good now.

Shareholders flocked in, quicker than you could say "Asset Bubble". If you bought into Polly Peck early enough, say, in the year Top Gun came out, you could turn a £1,000 investment into £1m - a huge return even by the champagne-soaked Square Mile standards of the day.

But to cash in, you had to know when to sell.

The downturn started when Nadir tried, and failed, to take Polly Peck off the FTSE 100 and back into private ownership. The party was really over when the Serious Fraud Office raided the company that ran his family's financial affairs, called South Audley Management. Six weeks later, the administrators had been called in.

The UK authorities moved with their traditional speed, and it was just three short years later that Nadir was facing the prospect of 66 charges of theft and false accounting involving £34 million. Instead, he hopped on a flight to Paris, and was soon in Northern Cyprus - a territory with which Britain does not have an extradition treaty.

There he has stayed. Until last week.

He's now back.

Prosecution lawyers and Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigators must now trace 183 witnesses, some of whom may have died since Nadir fled. Zillions of documents have to be recovered. In the meantime, he remains on conditional bail under curfew and, despite his lawyers' objections, electronically tagged.

A £250,000 bail security has been deposited with the City of London magistrates, and he must reside at his £20,000-a-month rented Mayfair home, where he is subject to a midnight to 6am curfew. He must report each week to Chelsea police station, and has already surrendered his Turkish and British passports.

I think this is ludicrous. He should be in a cell. Preferably sharing a bunk with a glue sniffing violent delusional transexual rapist. Well, that's not quite fair. And Michael Barrymore isn't in prison anyway.

But the truth is, we definitely shouldn't be letting Nadir keep his house, and generally lord it up while on remand.

Why?

Because fraud is a rational crime. It's not as though you turn around and steal £36 million through a complicated share swapping scheme in a moment of passion. Deterrence works well on rational criminals - especially ones in it for the money, who understand delayed gratification. If you think, well, "even if I get caught, I may only do seven or eight years in what amounts to a poor quality golf-club", then it's not nearly enough of a penalty to make them think twice.

On top of the deterrence factor, we treat white-collar criminals far too well - we as a society do not extract nearly enough retribution from them. The damage they wreak is enormous. The cost isn't in millions of pounds - it's in marriages broken up, houses lost, suicides, failed businesses, misery for thousands. The societal cost is at least as great as for acts like robbery - and robbery carries a minimum 20 year sentence.

Of course, this kind of white collar crime is going on all the time. No, really.

For example, recently JP Morgan won an award for providing the following service:

The process of rehypothecation allows institutions - in many cases hedge fund clients - to extract greater value from their collateral by reusing this collateral elsewhere in the market, increasing liquidity and reducing collateral costs.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan's forward-thinking Rehypothecation Program stood out, directly addressing market misgivings regarding the practice while simultaneously allowing the practice to be safely extended to the benefit of clients. Winner of both this year's Chair's Choice and Innovation in Custody and Securities Services, JPMorgan Rehypothecation Program supports the multi-asset class, unlimited re-use of collateral.

Yes, unlimited re-use of collateral. Or, in other words, taking out as many loans as you can on a single asset. Disastrous? Short-Sighted? Of course. Sadly, they are unlikely to land up in jail - and lets face it, even if they do, they can probably evade justice as easily as Azil Nadir probably will.

Some people I know said to me recently that they didn't feel we didn't get enough concessions out of the banks during the financial crisis. To them I say, "don't worry - there'll be another one along in a minute".

Duke of York's (Eton) Mess

I attended a public school called the Duke of York's Royal Military School for a while, back in the 90s. Recently, the Duke's came third from bottom of the school league tables with an average pass rate substantially lower than that of the average state school.

Ahem. So, here's the public schoolboy dessert from a graduate of school whose pupils are very unlikely to ever threaten the global financial order.

Duke of York's Mess




Preparation time: less than 15 mins
Cooking time: As quickly as you can tip it into the glasses.
Serves 6


Ingredients

A big bag of pre-made meringue nests - at least 10 individual nests.
Pint double cream
Vanilla essence
2 heaped tablespoons caster sugar
Punnet of strawberries, sliced
Punnet of Raspberries
1 teaspoon good-quality balsamic vinegar
A half glass of port
Fresh mint leaves

This is a cheating version, but a.) cheating is all part of the public school ethos and b.) this is a super quick dessert

Whip the double cream with the vanilla and 1 tablespoon of your sugar until you have soft peaks. Don’t over-whip it or the cream will go thick and cloddy – you want it to stay light and delicate.

Take half the strawberries and half the raspberries and put them into a bowl with the rest of the sugar and the balsamic vinegar & port. Mash up with a fork.

Serve Eton mess in individual glasses. To assemble it, first, smash up your meringues. I find putting them into a bag and swinging it into a wall a few time produces a nice and suitably random mix, with some shattered to dust, and some almost whole and crispy.

Make SURE you hide the evidence of the pre-bought meringues - real public school guests/girlfriends will look down on you for not having your butler make your own meringues. On an aga.

Fold the vanilla cream and mushed-up fruit together till well mixed, then sprinkle in the rest of the fruit and fold again. Layer your crushed meringues and fruity cream into your serving dish or glasses, then sprinkle with the mint leaves as garnish.

Put everything together right at the last minute so that the meringue won’t go all soft.

Serve while commenting on an article you just read in the Economist on why poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough in Chinese slave-mills.

Carnival causes blogger to lose focus.

I swear, the peacock came right for me. It was huge. As big as a man. Full of the demon rum.




Apologies for the lack of a post (again!) on here.

It's easy to get out of the rhythm of blogging - this week the Notting Hill Carnival intervened. Still, I'll be back on the case soon, I promise!

Just one more snap from NHC to give you non-londoners a feel for it:

No Post this Week.

Due to an outbreak of weddings & charming American guests, there will be no blog this week. Congrats to Hannah, Phil, Rachel & Allan on their fabulous weddings. Normal service will resume on Friday!

Africa, War & Child Soldiers you've never heard of

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post - it seemed rude to write personal stuff when I had 9,000 words of work to produce. Fortunately, that's all out of the way, so now I can catch up. I assume most of you read it sneakily on Monday mornings at work anyway!

So, this week, in between producing large reports for work, I was bloody annoyed that a war crimes tribunal is devolving into what amounts to a bitchy fight between two talentless slags.

I am of course, talking about the Trial of Charles Taylor. He's currently on trial for a wide variety of assorted war crimes - most of which feature a recurring theme of recruiting of child soldiers, then either supplying them so badly they are forced to loot and/or commit cannibalism, all the while using them to guard the slaves digging your diamond mines &/or rape camps.



Above: Maybe if the child soldiers were white, there'd be more coverage.

The world's news media has decided that two not-even-that-famous any more celebs arguing over what happened at a particularly squalid dinner party is more important than the trial of man who has been accused of-

• Five counts of war crimes: specifically, terrorizing civilians, murder, outrages on personal dignity, cruel treatment, and looting;

• Five counts of crimes against humanity: specifically, state-sanctioned murder, rape, sexual slavery, mutilating and beating, and enslavement; and

• One count of other serious violations of international humanitarian law: recruiting and using child soldiers.

To quote one other witness, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, one of Taylor's erstwhile military commanders, "We executed everybody – babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all." Taylor had encouraged his commandants - usually former child soldiers themselves - to cannibalise victims, in exchange for $200 of "cigarette money".

It is the prominence given to this squalid dinner party compared to other testimony from the trial that feels odd.

Both Sky News and the BBC News channel cleared their schedules for over an hour and a half, thus devoting more coverage to Naomi Campbell than to the whole of the rest of Taylor's trial since 2007.

In fact, Sky have not covered any of the other 90 witnesses – not even Taylor himself. The Guardian website & the good old Beeb led on the trial when the former president testified, but other outlets - ranging from the Today programme, Channel 4 News & even debaters-bible The Economist have all ignored the trial while in session.

This is at all surprising, but nowhere near as shocking as the lack of attention given to another child-soldier fuelled conflict, that has been rumbling on since the overthrow of appalling dictator of Congo Mbutu Sese Seko in 1997.

Congo's history often seems like an uninterrupted tale of woe. After decades of often brutal foreign rule, first as the private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium and then as a Belgian colony, Congo won its independence in 1960. But within months its first elected Prime Minister had been murdered by Belgium- and U.S.-backed opponents because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union, an assassination that eventually opened the way for army general Mobutu Sese Seko to grab power.

A U.S. favorite during the cold war, Mobutu presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in African history, siphoning off billions from state-owned companies and allowing most of the country to languish in poverty & disorder.

In 1996 neighboring Rwanda and Uganda jointly invaded Congo to eliminate the Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, that had been responsible for the Rwandan genocide and were hiding in Congo's eastern forests. As the invading armies advanced across the country, Mobutu fled, and the invaders installed a small-time rebel leader named Laurent Kabila as President.

But things got worse. In 1998, after Kabila got too friendly with the Interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa's first world war. The scramble for power and resources dragged in forces from at least eight African neighbors, spawned a myriad of Congolese factions and set off campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Kabila, as nasty and corrupt as his predecessor, was shot dead by one of his bodyguards in 2001. His son Joseph, 29, has ruled since.

In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed in 2006 was supposed to halt the war between nine countries, in addition to 20 separate private armies of indigenous Congolese. In short, you probably needed more space in the signing box than for the average, standard form peace treaty.

The war produced a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II. But you never even heard about it.

The suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. In particular, I was personally involved with a project to protect, arm & train the Northern Pygmy alliance from being preyed upon by militias who regarded them as "subhuman" - with some believing that eating pygmy flesh can confer magical powers. But you never heard about that, either.

The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing hundreds of villages. Even deadlier are the side effects of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.

According to the IRC, which has conducted a series of detailed mortality surveys over the past ten years, 1,250 Congolese still die every day because of war-related causes--the vast majority succumbing to diseases and malnutrition that wouldn't exist in peaceful times. In many respects, the country remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on earth.

Yet Congo's troubles rarely make news headlines, and the country is often low on international donors' lists of places to help. After Sudan, Congo is the second largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, a land so vast and ungovernable that it has long been perceived as the continent's ultimate hellhole, the setting for Joseph Conrad's 1899 book Heart of Darkness.

It is in part because of that malign reputation--and because the nation's feckless rulers have consistently reinforced it--that the world has been willing to let Congo bleed. Since 2000, the U.N. has spent billions on its peacekeeping mission in Congo, which is known by its French acronym, MONUC, and it is at the moment the largest U.N. force anywhere in the world. However, the troops number just 17,500, a tiny force to secure a country almost the size of the EU. Many of the battalions are besieged in their bases by the resurgent militias. But you didn't hear about that.

In February, the U.N. and aid groups working in Congo asked for $682 million in humanitarian funds. So far, they have received just $94 million--or $9.40 for every person in need. By comparison, Oxfam estimates that Haiti appeal last year raised $550 for each person. But you didn't hear about that - and they don't have a former member of the Fugees running for President to make headlines - so you probably won't.

In short, the message from The Hague today is you can have as many child soldiers as you like, but if you really want to impress the 21st-century western media, then no matter how brutal your crimes you do need to have a celebrity on board.

Depressing. What we need is a celeb to take up the cause...

Get Him To The Greek Opening - watch more funny videos

Of course, if you are interested in Africa, I can't recommend a better blog than the excellent Will Jones' "My name is not Muzungu"...

African Panga Stew

This is a stew recipe taught to me by an old friend, who I used to debate with.

He was a Ugandan, and had spent some of his childhood as an abducted child soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. There are few University Debaters who are genuinely imposing; very few who you really believe when they talk about the problems of tiny African countries. However, there is something very convincing about having a 6'6" Ugandan who's eyes wordlessly proclaimed "real machete experience" telling you the way it is.

By the way, he advised getting a Panga, rather than a machete - they are bigger, even scarier knives that look a bit like this:



For a team from a tiny university in the middle of a glum swamp, we did pretty well. But there would always be a point where we'd have to discuss Africa, and then things would go horribly wrong. Some bespectacled Oxbridge gnome would insist that the problems of Africa were easily solved by a more neo-liberal economic outlook or something, which would prompt from my debate partner "the speech", as we called it.

This would usually start with the phrase "You - white man - want to tell ME how to solve the problems of AFRICA?!?!?" Then there'd be a story about growing up in the third world, told with a frankly terrifying chopping action with his hands. We'd often lose that round, usually at a crucial part of the tournament. Long on charisma and gut-wrenching terror, short on analysis & facts, tragically.

Looking back, I am impressed by the integrity of the judges - I'd have given him a string of firsts, just to avoid the possible bloodsoaked freakout on telling him he came last. Usually, after we got back to Bristol, the gentleman in question would cook me this stew - based on a recipe his mother taught him, improvised from easily available UK ingredients.

It's delicious, warming and spicy - it also spends a large amount of time unattended on the hob, so it's perfect for entertaining at short notice, or alternatively for saying "I can't believe the judge in round four gave us a third!"

Panga Stew

Serves 4

Olive oil
2 red onions
4 cloves garlic
6 sausages – about 400g
One pack of Supermarket Chorizo
Cheating lazy chillies - English Provender company does the best, in my opinion.
A glass of dry sherry, vermouth or Dry White wine - my chum was quite the Sherry drinker, oddly enough.
5 or 6 decent-sized tomatoes - or a couple of cans of tomatoes.
2 x 400g tins chick peas
small bunch parsley



1.) Warm the olive oil in a deep pan. I use a cast iron casserole. Peel the onions, roughly chop them and add them to the oil, stirring to coat them, then letting them cook. Peel the garlic, slice it (with a panga, if you like) and stir it into the onions. Cook until the onions are soft.

2.)Cut each sausage into about three fat chunks. Mix these in with the softened onions then add a teaspoon or so of the chillies. Then stir in the chorizo. Pour in a glass of dry sherry, vermouth or white wine and bring it to an enthusiastic bubble. Chop the tomatoes roughly, add them and bring them to the boil, then add the chickpeas, drained of their canning liquor and rinsed, then pour in a can of water, then season with salt and black pepper. Bring to the boil then turn down to a simmer and leave to cook, slowly, half covered with a lid for 45 minutes.

3.)Stir from time to time, and check the liquor levels. What you want to end up with is a brick-red sauce with a wonderful spiciness from the chillies and chorizo. Chop the parsley, but only roughly, then stir into the stew.



Serve in shallow bowls, making certain everyone gets a fair bit of sausage. Otherwise, there may be violence.

Porn; or, the CPS - keeping you safe from ...yourself?

It's been pointed out to me that my blog, while well written, could use some search engine optimisation. That's why I'm going to write about Porn. Steamy, dirty, nasty porn. The sort of thing you might buy in this wonderfully named shop in Soho:



If you're not a fan of Porn, please feel free to not read this article. Instead, you can click on this link - it leads to a video of a baby panda sneezing. (Honestly. It really does. You do trust me, right?)

Of course, if you're not a fan of Porn, that's statistically unlikely.

Porn isn't a small business. It's a major industry. Pornography - particularly on the internet -is now estimated to generate around $14bn worldwide, roughly the same amount as Hollywood's US box office receipts. The US leads the world in pornography (USA! USA!); about 211 new films are produced every week. The Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and most of those in the trade are perfectly respectable citizens. Admittedly, they tend to have more surgery & fake tan than most, but they pay their taxes, and are citizens just like everyone else. As are the consumers of their products.

It's not just an American phenomenon. In the UK, we spend more money at strip clubs than we do in the West End, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined.

Of course, there's all kinds of other sexual stuff on the internet that you don't have to pay for. Indeed, one of the people I used to work with on Bizarre magazine used to say "you aren't a real pervert if there's a pay-site for what you're into".

On websites like deviantart and in chatrooms like mIRC, you can find pretty much any fetish you like. While working my stint at Bizarre, I did see some stuff that made even me blanch - from women who liked to have sex with men dressed in werewolf costumes, to men who were unaccountably attracted to balloons. There are even whole websites devoted to people who find Sarah Palin attractive.

People who are into this sort of thing are, by definition, perverts. But is that a bad thing? Sadly, the UK's CPS prosecutors seem to think so, and don't worry, they are "protecting" us. Mostly, it seems, from ourselves.

Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it illegal to use the internet to send or receive a message or communication which is any of the following:

- grossly offensive
- indecent
- obscene
- menacing
- annoying
- inconveniencing

Yes, saying annoying things on the internet is illegal in England.



I'll just give you a second to digest that. Just have a quick flip through the Guardian Comment is Free while you think about it. Then call the Police, and have the writer of this article arrested.

Of course, I don't really want him arrested. He's wrong, not a criminal. Free speech anyone?

Clearly, the people who framed this law should probably not spend five minutes on any internet forum, or read the comment pages of any major newspaper - indeed, reading the speeches of contenders in the Labour leadership contest is probably an absolute no-go area for most people, as in many ways, offence is in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, this could just be an obscure law no-one cares about - there are plenty of those on the statute books. But the CPS are pushing this one to the hilt. For example, this year a clearly jokey tweet was held to be "menacing" under this act, and the tweeter was sent to prison. Ridiculous.

However, an even more egregious case has come to my attention.

The saga began last summer when, following an anonymous tip-off, police raided Andrew Holland's home looking for indecent images of children. They found none, but they did find two clips, one involving a woman purportedly having sex with a tiger, and one which is believed to have depicted sado-masochistic activity between consenting adults.

Holland's was charged with possessing extreme porn, and denied access to his children as a result, despite the fact that there was no suggestion anything paedophilic was involved. Would this happen to a Burglar? To a fraudster? No, of course not - but once a "crime" is defined as sexual, all rights go out the window.

In a first court appearance in January of this year, the "tiger porn" charge was dropped when prosecuting counsel discovered the volume control and at the end of the 7 second clip heard the animated tiger turn to camera and say: "That beats doing adverts for a living" - it was an cartoon spoof of Tony the Tiger from the Frosties cereal adverts.

The clip was therefore deemed to be "unrealistic" and out of scope as far as extreme porn legislation was concerned. The court then turned its attention to the allegedly more serious clip involving adult interaction.

In March, following advice from his legal team, Holland pleaded guilty to possessing one extreme porn clip and was stunned to be told that he might face a prison sentence. Holland then spoke to members of Consenting Adult Action Network and sexual rights organisation Backlash, who put him in touch with their legal adviser, Myles Jackman of Audu and Co in King's Cross, London.

Jackman, a solicitor specialising in extreme pornography offences (I bet that is a great business card), advised Holland that contrary to previous advice, there were grounds for pleading not guilty. On this basis, Holland took the unusual step of applying to the court for permission to "vacate his plea". This is a technical device whereby an individual may go back on a guilty plea at any time before sentencing.

In May a judge granted Holland leave to vacate his plea from guilty back to not guilty. Holland was therefore due to stand trial again. The CPS, however, declined to offer any evidence on the day (yeah, fucking it up for free as usual), and the matter is at an end - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer. The CPS has not yet commented on this matter, or on the fact that on each charge, it was not until the day of the court appearance that they decided the evidence to hand was inadequate.

I assume putting out a statement saying "Basically, we are really, really incompetent" is just too humiliating.

Of course, had Mr.Holland not contacted Backlash in the first place he would have been sentenced for an offence which other people have not only escaped prosecution for, but in fact have made fortunes over in the Libel courts. Yes, I'm thinking of you, Max Mosely.

Why should we criminalise relatively odd porn if we don't criminalise the sex acts themselves? Of course we should criminalise some sex acts; but if the acts are legal (or impossible), why is it right to criminalise seeing images of them? I just don't see a harm to it; certainly not one which justifies spending a fortune and hugely limiting liberty. Fortunately, Mr. Holland has since be reunited with his children.

Other cases have not ended so well. For example, Kent Police are in the process of using the Obscene Publications Act as a means to prosecute an individual, Gavin Smith, of Swanscombe for publishing obscenity in respect of a log of a private online chat he had with another individual. This case marks an extension of the law into an area that its originators could never have envisaged – text chat. Most internet users would regard it as person-to-person conversation.

The legal principle at stake here is whether internet chat constitutes "publication" in the ordinary sense of the word, or can be treated as private conversation. If the former is the conclusion, then anyone with even a passing interest in unusual sexual fantasies may need to be very careful in respect of any online conversations they have in future.

IRC will no longer be quite the refuge of the bizarre and the outlandish it once was. In my opinion, that's a shame. There's a case for the state to legislate to outlaw some things - but private conversation and private, harmless fantasies should not be one of them.

So, in short, we live in a country were the CPS are willing to prosecute a man for being a bit kinky, but not willing to prosecute a man who beat someone to death. Not for the first time, I do worry about the country.

Juicy Italian Sausage, spurting with thick, white sauce - Oo-err missus!

Well, I need an innuendo filled recipe to fit in with the above. Hmmm. Hard.

(See what I did there?)

Italian Sausage in a White Wine & Cream sauce


What you need



12 Italian Sausages (.com?)
One Red onion, sliced
Half a bottle of wine
One tub of single cream
Half a punnet of mushrooms, sliced
300g of Penne Pasta
Olive oil

One large pan for the sauce, one large pan for the pasta

Cooking time: 30 minutes (15 minutes prep, 15 minutes cooking)

Serves:4

Method

1.) Slice the skin of each sausage, and slide the skin off, leaving you with a large pile of sausage meat. Bring the pasta pan to boil while you do this, but do not add the pasta yet.



2.) Add the onion to the pan, and fry in the oil until the onion becomes tender. Then crumble in the sausage meat. Fry the sausage meat until all the flesh looks cooked; try to avoid it forming balls or clumps by vigorous stirring.



3.) Add the pasta to the boiling water.

4.) Add the mushrooms in to the sauce mixture, stirring them in until they begin to take on a golden yellow hue.

5.) Add the wine. I've said use a half bottle, but you generally want to cover the meat rather than drown it. It's generally a judgement call. Simmer this for about five minutes, until most of the alcohol has burned off the wine, but a reasonable amount of liquid remains.



6.) Turn down the heat, then stir in the cream and the basil in to the sauce.



7.) Drain the pasta, then stir the pasta into the sauce.

8.) Serve to middle class dinner party you have invited your cute-but-sleazy bohemian friend to. Orgy optional.



Hope you enjoy it!

Savage Cuts

Lots of people this week are lamenting the end of the UK Film Council.

I'm a fully paid up cinephile - I'm probably in the cinema twice a week, splitting my time between my local beret-and-turtleneck arthouse (The Curzon on the Kings Road) & the much more low rent picture palace just along from it, which shows an assortment of hollywood shlockbusters - I'm sure I'll trot off there to see this cinematic maserpiece:



As I write, Facebook, Twitter, an online petition and the letters page of The Guardian are alive with calls to save the UKFC. Am I disappointed by the end of the UK film council? No, because it represents exactly the sort of cuts that should be made.

To understand last week’s move, you need to know that last August Labour culture minister Sion Simon proposed a merger of the UKFC with the British Film Institute, the country’s other big film body, which manages the National Film Archive, runs BFI Southbank and organises the London Film Festival. The plan (despite Labour's shrieks of disgust this week) was to cut costs and prevent overlap. Neither did it help relations that the UKFC’s execs were on far higher salaries compared to those doing similar jobs at the BFI, but were to be the ones who were to be kept.

The BFI were horrified. They were going to be subsumed into an ugly New Labour quango, which was obsessed with pumping lottery money projects like Harry Potter and then claiming it as a "British Triumph". To claim the Harry Potter film franchise is a British Triumph is akin to claiming Monopoly is just like real bond trading. It looks sort of like it on the surface, but really is nothing of the sort. All the money, all the profit, flowed back to the USA.

People are talking about £15 million pounds being removed from UK film funding - that's not correct. The £15 million figure was amount of Lottery funds disbursed by the UKFC - minus the £6 million plus combined staffing cost of the 75 people who work for the UKFC.

The lottery money - which was often blown on shit films like 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' and 'The Parole Officer' is still there. It's just now in the hands of the eminently more reliable BFI - who have a far better track record than the UKFC - ‘Dog Soldiers’, '28 days later' & ‘Slumdog Millionaire' all started with BFI seed money.

Certainly, the UKFC did have a hand in some good films - notably 'Hunger' - but for the record, its last disbursement was for two street dance films in 3d, both of which utterly bombed at the box office. Of course, Hunger bombed at the box office in comparison to Harry Potter too, but it had the saving grace of being artistically brilliant.

So, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the UKFC were not. The french new wave, the UKFC was not. UK film funding has not dropped; we fired £6 million pounds worth of bureaucrats. This is no reason to weep. We need to take this sort of action across all the areas of the budget.

On this topic, the treasury recently set up a website, by which you could suggest ideas for cuts that the government hadn't thought of. Nice idea, but predictably, it had to be removed, as it swiftly filled up with lunatic racist rants - as anyone who has ever posted a youtube video or read the brilliant Speak your Branes would have been able to explain.

In the absence of the website, some of the things I'd like to see cut are:

Civil Service Pay

The Civil service is ludicrously bloated. There are 525,000 of them, out of 6 million public sector employees. Civil servants are on incremental pay scales, which rise automatically. They need a pay freeze. Now. If it was down to me, I'd also impose a 15% salary cut on all civil service salaries over £25,000, with some sort of phase in at the margin.

On top of that, there are hundreds of civil servants languishing in non-jobs, because they are too expensive to make redundant. Why? Because of the crippling cost of making them redundant. Civil servants have one of the most lucrative redundancy deals in the country, a system which Labour tried but failed to scrap. The terms of their redundancy deal is extraordinarily generous, with many civil servants eligible to receive about six years’ pay if they are made compulsorily redundant.

For example, a 46 year old earning £40,000 who had been a civil servant for 25 years could enjoy a cash payment of about 6.2 years’ salary on retirement, or around £300,000.

We literally can't afford to sack them, but cutting this to an (eminently fair) one year's salary as redundancy payment would save 6 Billion pounds over 10 years. If the unions strike, will the public support them in claiming this outrageous gilded perk? I doubt it.

Second, the civil service offers a pretty ridiculous pension scheme. Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer (us) is charged another 22% on top - and we have to maintain that pension, index linked, until death. We should renegotiate their contracts, making it clear they can quit now, or accept a deal which is fair to the country.

No Tax cuts

There are some taxes I loathe. Inheritance tax in particular. Sadly, the truth is, we can't really afford any tax cuts until the titanic deficit is cleared. Don't worry, in 2015 I'll start banging on about why it's unfair.

Means test all Benefits

Means test all benefits, especially child benefit. There's a whole plethora of universal benefits like this - for example, a couple of my friends who are reasonably well off recently had a baby, and the government sent them child toothbrushes and a teddy bear - plus they claim the £20 a week in child benefit.

This is a couple who aren't short a bob or two - he's an oil engineer and she's an oncologist. There is absolutely no way that people earning £100,000 a year should be entitled to free toothbrushes, teddies or cheques. This isn't an isolated case - other deeply middle class friends get child benefit, and I see no reason that the state should subsidise people buying Glyndebourne tickets (or whatever else they spend the money on).

Benefits are meant as a safety net, not a perk you get for citizenship.

Pensions

Equally, there's no way people with over £300,000 in assets should get the old age pension - why not means test it? Secondly, why don't we raise the retirement age to 70 for people currently 30 or under? All of us are of the "screwed generation" who had to pay to go to university - this has inculcated in us a feeling that we cannot rely on the state. We will have forty years to prepare for retirement. The saving from pushing our pension entitlement back would be tremendous - billions and billions of pounds.

Citizen allowance

There are 55 benefits for being out of work or on low income at the moment. ESA, JSA, New Deal, LCA, Income Support, ALA, Incapacity benefit, tax credits, housing benefit. Every single one has an office of bloodsuckers assessing claims, while picking their nose on the telephone.

Why not replace all these benefits with a single welfare payment to all unemployed people (pensioners, the sick, the incapable, the lazy - everyone), regardless of why they are unemployed? It would let us get rid of literally thousands of assessors and would have the tremendous advantage of greatly simplifying the benefits system, making access to it easier for those in need.

This was actually one of the quite a few parts of the Green manifesto I really liked, but more on that some other day...

Defence Cuts

Something has to give. We aren't a great power anymore. If we want nuclear arms, conventional weapons will have to go. If we want to maintain a decent conventional airforce, army and navy, our ocean-going holocaust delivery systems are going to have to be scaled back or cut altogether.

Another discussion for another blog post I think.

Centralisation of all Services for all Local Authority Back Offices

This isn't a very sexy cut. There aren't any movies with machine guns or aircraft carriers or middle class people using benefits to buy champagne & opera tickets. But it is vital.

Every local & county council up and down the country has rooms and rooms full of worthless pen pushers in Billing departments, Accounting departments, IT departments, HR departments & Procurement Services.

These are broad areas whereby each local authority manages the services independently (read:badly) and where the jobs are the same but managed locally by local authorities within local budgets. I can't see any reason why most of the above cannot be centralised. In particular, centralised procurement on major contracts would yield huge savings.

Conclusion

These cuts are probably further than the coalition will go - but they should be pushing this far.

These cuts are relatively painless; which will be crucial for maintaining the mandate of the electorate. To maintain support, the coalition has to cut the deficit, while not letting the axe fall on the weakest in society. We have to maintain the NHS; we can't let benefits fall too far.

In short, don't be distracted by all the noise around the UK Film Council - it was a room full of bureaucrats. More of those need to go.

Chicken - With savage cuts

With all this theme of savage cutting, I think it's probably wise to do a recipe that a.) involves cutting and b.) is suitable for these frugal times.

Chicken is getting increasingly expensive, especially if you're going for leg or breast meat, or organic birds.

I find a much cheaper alternative to buying large amounts of chicken precut is to joint your own chicken. This also means you can roast it all together remarkably quickly, with the bones in for flavour.

There's also a part of me which rebels at the idea of getting meat without realising it comes from an animal - I think far too few people actually think about what they are eating. Chicken is particularly bad for this; I often end up buying chicken breast, and can't help but compare the pink, skinless things under the cellophane to buying a tray of baby rodents or something.



Above: Less like a rodent



Quick Roast Chicken with Savage cuts

Preparation time: 15 minutes the first time, 5 minutes with practice
Cooking time: 30 minutes



Ingredients:

1 Chicken
Olive Oil
2 Cloves of Garlic
A Lemon
A glass of White wine
A handful of Basil

Tools:

One big sharp knife
A Roasting tin
A lack of squeamishness

Preparation:

1.)Cut through the skin between the leg and the breast. Feel like a manly hunter gatherer as you butcher the beast.

2.)Bend the leg back as far as possible, so the end of the leg bone pops out from the socket. Feel powerful as you snap the creature's bones with one mighty blow. Just like being the Hulk.

3.) Cleave the leg away from the body with one mighty blow. Repeat on the other side. Imagine you are a Samurai while doing this.

4.) Cut through the joints connecting the drumsticks to the thighs and separate the two different bits. Just like being Quincy, MD.

5.) Back to Samurai mode, and slice off the wings.

6.) To serve the breasts off the bone, cut either side of the breastbone & then carefully remove the breast meat from the bones with your sharp knife. If serving on the bone, turn the chicken over and cut through the centre of the breastbone to separate the breasts. Yes, breasts. This is a manly dish. Phoar, etc.

Voila! You have 8 pieces of chicken, for far less money than you'd otherwise spend. If you like, you can even use the carcass to make stock, but we'll stay away from that for now.



Cooking:

1.) Season the Chicken, add your handful of dried basil, and push garlic under the chicken skin, then and put the pieces in the roasting tin.

2.) Pour enough olive oil over the chicken to ensure all the pieces are lightly covered - enough so a shallow pool forms.

3.) Quarter the lemon, squeeze lemon juice all over the chicken, then bung in the lemon bits.



4.)Roast for thirty five minutes on gas mark 6/200 degrees.

5.) Remove from the oven, tip in a glass of wine (pictured wine is very firmly Eastern European, called something like Château T-34), and heat the roasting tin over a low heat on the hob until the wine bubbles. Then remove and serve with a green salad or vegetables.



Delicious, quick, and probably cheaper than a Kiev.