Banditry: The idle musings of John B

There are two possible meanings that the phrase ‘anti-Europe’ can carry.

One is the Fox News interpretation, under which Europe is full of gay, garlic-eating communists, and therefore should be bombed, or at least avoided. The other is the opposition to European political integration, or to the view of Europe as a political rather than solely a geographic entity.

If someone’s from Europe and/or voluntarily in Europe [*] – which includes almost everyone with any interest at all in the debate on European political integration – to describe that person as ‘anti-Europe’ in its first meaning would make no sense at all, unless they were actually an insane self-loather (Melanie Phillips is not a counterexample here).

Hence, people opposed to European political integration who complaining about the use of ‘anti-European’ to describe them are silly. Nobody’s claiming that you hate yourself, football, the Parthenon, black pudding, the English language and motorways. You do, however, hate the concept of Europe as a political entity. And that’s why you’re being described as ‘anti-Europe’.

There is some truth in the complaint, in that there’s a genuine conceptual difference between ‘anti-Europe’ and ‘anti-EU’. While most anti-EU types are also anti-Europe, there are a few people who favour European political integration but also believe that the EU is so hopelessly corrupt and useless that it should be abolished and we should start again. But they’re the only ones to whom that distinction applies, there really aren’t very many of them, and they’re not the people who join UKIP…

[*] a reminder to UKIPpers: the UK is, geographically, in Europe.

Charlie Brooker sums up Britishness with t3h excellence:

I was born in the 70s and grew up in a tiny rural village. There was, I think, only one black kid in my primary school. One day, someone pushed him over and called him “blackjack”. The headmaster called an impromptu assembly. It involved the entire school, and took place outdoors. No doubt: this was unusual.

We stood in military rows in the playground. I must have been about six, so I can’t remember the words he used, but the substance stuck. He spoke with eerie, measured anger. He’d fought in the second world war, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone “different”, that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called “the Nazis”. Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were “different’ wasn’t merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone – anyone – using racist language again, they’d immediately get the slipper.

Corporal punishment was still alive and well, see. The slipper was his nuclear bomb.

It was the first time I was explicitly told that racism was unpleasant and it was a lesson served with a side order of patriot fries. Or rather, chips. Our headmaster had fought for his country, and for tolerance, all at once. That’s what I understood it meant to be truly “British”: to be polite, and civil and fair of mind. (And to occasionally wallop schoolkids with slippers, admittedly, but we’ll overlook that, OK? We’ve moved on.)

Hating furriners, wanting to kick out furriners, being jealous of furriners – all of that nonsense is as foreign, un-British and generally despicable as it gets.

…for its glorious living-up-to-stereotypes-ness:

The latest unemployment figures could not be released today because statisticians are on strike

So, when I said “don’t bother switching banks,” what I actually meant was “don’t bother switching banks unless your bank, instead of falling under the UK compensation scheme, falls under the compensation scheme of a small, rainy, historically very poor island which crazily overexpanded over the last five years and has absolutely no chance of meeting its bailout obligations if things go wrong”.

Sorry, Icesave investors. On the plus side, my point about the daftness of transferring money to Irish banks is made rather conclusively.

Oh, and while I’m clarifying – I’m in the lucky position where my savings (just about) go over the protected limit, and I’ve had them split between several accounts to diversify risk even before the current crisis started. While I think it’s likely that a crash – especially if it’s of a real bank, rather than ultra-high-interest online chancers – will bring full protection, it might not, so get transferring now if you’ve still got over £50k with one institution.

Relatedly, Seth Freedman has a piece in the Guardian, wondering why people who chose to sign up for ultra-high interest rates with a ropey over-leveraged bank should be bailed out at the expense of the poor and the prudent – and he has a good point. It’s fair for the government to fully compensate savers in banks that a reasonable person would see as ‘safe’ [*], but hard to justify going over the clearly stated FSCS limits for people who’re choosing to gain an extra 2% interest in exchange for investing in, say, the First Bank of Nigeria rather than Lloyds TSB.

Looking to the longer term, and today’s liquidity-for-shares UK bank nationalisation announcement, my dad has a piece up on Liberal Conspiracy arguing that liquidity bail-outs are a terrible idea, as the crisis would otherwise be an excellent opportunity to get rid of the parasitical bastards at the major investment banks and end the toll they’ve exacted on the global economy ever since the Depression. If my dad were Mark Steel, that’d be unsurprising; since he’s been a stockbroker for 30 years and is currently head of investment banking for a broking firm, it’s a little more interesting…

[*] there’s a difference between savers in Northern Rock or HBOS, and Icesave or First Bank of Nigeria here. Northern Rock was originally a safe, conservative institution that made itself unsafe without most of its customers noticing, while HBOS did something similar (with less ineptitude and worse luck). On the other hand, Landsbanki was a foreign investment bank that nobody in the UK had ever heard of, and that was massively over-extended when Icesave started – and FBN is actually a reasonably good institution by local standards that appears to be holding up well, but hello! it’s a fucking Nigerian bank!

Update 8/10: Darling has copped out slightly. Rightly, he’s agreed to pay the €20,000 that the Icelandic government should have covered to Icesave savers; and rightly, he’s frozen Landsbanki’s remaining UK assets in the hope of recovering some money to offset against the compensation. Wrongly, he’s also covering deposits over £50k, which should have been written off to “if you’re that stupid then you don’t deserve to have 2x the average annual wage in cash”. Still, it’s more evidence for my “put the deposits in whatever goddamn bank you choose and you’re still safe” theory…

I’m deeply annoyed that I work for a company that places onerous restrictions on my ability to trade shares, even on my personal account – if I didn’t, then I’d pile some serious money into HBOS stock right now…

September 17 update:

Fuckery. That’s £3,000 I would have made, buying at 150 yesterday and selling at 190 today. Lloyds TSB are wise – as, semirelatedly, are Barclays. Also, can the gibbering clowns who think this is the End Of The World / the Collapse Of The Global Financial System / etc please go away? Finally, this.

Unrelated October 1 update:

OK, so WordPress is doing some deeply weird things which stop me from, among other things, writing new posts and editing or approving comments. I’ll let you know when this is fixed…

Second Unrelated October 1 update:

Fixed.

From Poland, an excellent piece of life imitating art.

I’ve got a new piece up on the otherwise increasingly moribund Sharpener, about the terrifying public and press reaction – both in the UK and in Iran – that risks escalating a minor diplomatic incident into a casus belli. Hopefully sanity will prevail: ideally on both sides, but at the very least on ours…

I’ve just had a fabulous holiday in ex-Yugoslavia; I’d recommend a trip to Croatia and Slovenia to anyone, with the possible exception of people I dislike.

The new-found prosperity in both countries is amazing, given their past of communist stagnation and civil war – even in Slovenia, albeit briefly – as is the scenery. And the mountainous railway journey from Split to Zagreb is simply fabulous, except for people who suffer from motion sickness (such as my girlfriend, who enjoyed the view rather less than I did).

Vaguely relatedly, given that Slovenia is planning to replace its currency with the Euro in January 2007, I’ve written a piece at The Sharpener using economic data to address a couple of bizarre anti-Euro myths.

“Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area”, apparently. No word so far on whether this also deters the hoons from rorting.

I’m aware of most of the differences between British English (yuck, but it’s the least ambiguous term I can think of) and US English, and I’m pretty aware of what’s going on in US politics, at least on a national level. Australian English and politics can still leave me baffled, however:

PM: I suspected Iraq wheat rort

My comprehension wasn’t helped by the fact that Google News UK listed this as a story, and sourced it to the ‘Daily Telegraph’. I was left wondering what on Earth Tony Blair had actually suspected, and what kind of bizarre mangle his words had been through…