Our Scotland - www.our-scotland.org

Blackleaf

The Daily Mail's Stephen Glover lists ten reasons why the recession may bring some benefits to Britain.

These benefits include less immigration to Britain, Scots ignoring the SNP by concluding that Scotland would be better off riding the storm as part of a larger nation than a small, independent one - and that the future of the Euro currency may be in peril.

STEPHEN GLOVER: Ten reasons why we can look on the bright side

09th October 2008
Daily Mail
Stephen Glover

Will the Government's emergency measures to save our banks avert a financial apocalypse?

No one really knows.

Many so-called experts not only contradict one another but also - sometimes within a space of hours - themselves. We may be in the grip of events which no government can control.

Even if catastrophe is avoided, no one can doubt that we are in for a very rough time.

Russian billionaire and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich with girlfriend Daria Zhukova: 'Over the past decade an ever widening chasm has opened between the super-rich... and the hardworking middle classes'

House prices will almost certainly continue to fall. The stock market is most unlikely to have hit the bottom. Pensions are threatened. Hundreds of thousands of people will probably lose their jobs. Some families may never recover from what is going to happen to them over the next year or two.

So it may seem perverse to put all that on one side for the moment, and to think about the silver lining.

The fact is that, even while frightening things are going on, there are likely to be some significant benefits of a recession. Not everything will be doom and gloom.

Here are ten good things - not in any order of importance - that could emerge from an economic setback. They amount to a social revolution.

1. The events of the past few days have shown that the idea of the European Union as a cohesive superstate is a fantasy. Each country has attended to its own problems, with Ireland and Greece guaranteeing bank deposits while others have not.

I certainly do not yearn for the EU's demise, only for the limits of its power and scope to be defined and accepted. In times of crisis, national governments are apt to act on their own behalf. The events of the past few days suggest that even the future of the euro will be in peril if EU countries continue to go it alone.

2. Britain will no longer be seen as a honey pot for immigrants coming from the four corners of the earth. Most of them were drawn here not so much to pocket state benefits as to get jobs, which have been plentiful.

Even those, like this Government, who have argued that mass immigration has helped the economy have become worried by the pressures on social services and schools.

The indigenous working class has sometimes been priced out of the labour market by immigrants prepared to work for less, and there have been increasing social and racial tensions.

A recession will curb the influx of immigrants, which the Government has been unwilling or unable to do.

England and Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney and wife Coleen: 'Brassy footballer's wives ('WAGs') will be less in evidence'

3. Here is a benefit particularly close to my heart. At least one Premier League football club, West Ham, is threatened by bankruptcy.

According to one authority, top football clubs have liabilities of £3 billion, and their debts far exceed their income. Football stars are being paid too much, and will feel the pinch over the coming years. The whole disheartening cavalcade could grind to a halt.

Brassy footballer's wives ('WAGs') will be less in evidence, and there may be a return to the days when footballers were sportsmen whom we could respect rather than vulgar cultural icons.

4. All of which leads to a wider point. Over the past decade, an ever widening chasm has opened between the super-rich, comprising overpaid bankers, Russian oligarchs, footballers and such like, and the hardworking middle classes.

Our culture has been debased by the triumph of a small group of over-rewarded individuals who do not possess a social conscience and worship at the altar of conspicuous consumption.

When things were going well for them, these people thought they were gods. Now many of them have been exposed as rapacious and incompetent hucksters. Let's hope they will be forced to pull in their horns more than any of us.

5. When building societies start lending again, young people will be able to enter the housing market for the first time for many years. Of course, those who own houses will feel poorer, but those who aspire to do so will no longer be priced out of the market.

6. The recession should be good for Great Britain. The Scots, a naturally cautious race, may ignore the blandishments of Alex Salmond (left) and the Scottish Nationalists, and consider the perilous fate of small countries such as Iceland and even Ireland during a global slowdown. Better be part of a large country weathering the storms than a vulnerable tiny nation buffeted about by them.

7. We will hear less from the environmental fascists. I am far from being a 'global warning denier' but over the past few years one might have easily thought that there was no issue in the world worth discussing apart from melting ice caps and peaky polar bears.

In times of plenty people can afford to chew the cud endlessly, but this becomes a luxury and a self-indulgence when families are wondering how they will manage to feed themselves next week.

8. During the Thirties depression in America, both popular and serious culture were transformed. Violent films gave way to more uplifting, romantic ones, many of them musicals with stars such as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

Audiences struggling to make ends meet were inspired by stories of optimism.

At the same time, the Thirties encouraged serious writers such as John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser to write about the dangers of materialism and the excesses of capitalism.

Perhaps our own cinema will become less nihilistic and violent, while we may produce serious novelists who, rather than gazing at their own navels, tackle great social issues.

9. As in the Thirties and the last war, austerity can draw people together and increase social cohesion. Instead of boasting at dinner parties about the ever growing value of our houses, we may share our tales of woe as we wait at the bus stop, and our sense of shared experience will nourish a new spirit of civility.

10. Not all the cleverest young graduates will wish to get highly paid jobs in the City.

People who have been trained as engineers may want to build tunnels and bridges.

Conceivably - or is this too much to hope? - we might get back to producing real things, as countries such as Germany and Japan still do, and reduce our economic dependence on financial services, which, as we have seen, can vanish in a puff of wind.

The reining in of the EU; the curbing of destabilising mass immigration; the humbling of the vulgar super-rich; young people being able to buy property; the preservation of the Union; the quietening of the eco-fascists; a renewal of popular and serious culture; a new spirit of social solidarity; a rejection by the young of casino capitalism with its shallow temptations.

Here are some powerful reasons, if these things should come about, for not feeling too depressed by the future. In fact, I could mention at least ten more possible benefits of a recession.

I do not say they collectively outweigh the pain and setbacks that lie ahead. It would be better not to have a recession. But as we are going to have one, we might as well look on the bright side. A prolonged slump would be another matter, since that might entail damaging social upheaval.

A sharp recession, though, does offer the prospect of an orderly rebalancing of our society. It is possible that, when the whole exhausting experience is over, we may emerge as a saner, less vulgar people - thriftier, more united and, who knows, even happier.

And then, of course, the whole corrupting process will start up all over again.

dailymail.co.uk
__________________

_________________
[img]http://home.att.net/~chuckayoub/black_sabbath/black-sabbath-1970.jpg
[/img]
Black Sabbath - 1970

Holebender · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 11:17 am Post subject:

What is the matter with you people? You so obviously despise the Scots and yet you resist any movement towards Scottish independence. You're just plain weird.
_________________
"My instinct is to agree with your opinion of his verse, but I've never so much as glanced at it." - agentmancuso

Blackleaf · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:10 pm Post subject:

Is Alex Salmond's 'Arc of Prosperity' done for?

By Alan Cochrane
09/10/2008
The Telegraph

Bankrupt: Iceland, a nation with a land area larger than Scotland but smaller than England, has a population the size of Leicester. It is one of the small, rich, nordic nations the SNP pointed to as inspiration for an independent Scotland

There was a time in the not too distant past when the words “bank” and “Scotland” conjured up an image of dour respectability, certainly, but also of financial caution and of the utmost probity.

And in their native land there was an immense, if unspoken, pride among the population at large that the Bank of Scotland and its older brother the Royal Bank of Scotland — as they used to be called before mergers and takeovers saw them initialised as HBOS and RBS respectively — were so regarded.

The Scots may trumpet their famous inventors and engineers and laud their poets and authors but it was their staid, secure, canny bankers who quietly and unobtrusively gave their homeland an international reputation for excellence.

They are, as a result, appalled at the sight and sound of the names of these venerable institutions being dragged through the mud. It is as if the old maid on the corner had been exposed as a harlot.

The Scots have had good reason for their pride thus far. The financial services industry, based initially on Charlotte Square and dominated at first by a handful of discreet family-based firms — the Charlotte Square Mafia — has increased substantially in recent years.

So significant was the impact that they and Scotland’s banks had on the country’s economy — they helped make Edinburgh one of the world’s leading financial centres — that they persuaded Alex Salmond to use them as one of the major planks in his bid to break Scotland away from the rest of the United Kingdom.

A former economist with RBS, he believed that with the lower company taxes he planned for an independent Scotland and with himself and some of his friends and associates from the financial sector as driving forces, he could create a genuine enterprise economy in a Scotland free of what he claims are the shackles of the British financial system.

Most of all the Nat leader modelled his hopes and dreams on emulating what’s been called the Irish miracle, the boom times of the Dublin economy that created the Celtic Tiger. He envisioned a Celtic Lion, based on Edinburgh, to match what was happening across the Irish Sea.

Where is that vision today? Ireland is officially in recession with its government having to guarantee bank deposits and Iceland — another of those nations that formed what the Nats called the Arc of Prosperity but which is now dubbed, unkindly, the Arc of Insolvency — appears to be sinking beneath the waves of its own financial imprudence.

Not surprisingly and entirely understandably First Minister Salmond has been trying to talk up Scottish-based banks while attacking those who have been doing them down. But his onslaught on the “spivs and speculators” who were short-selling HBOS was a one-day wonder.

According to those who work for the bank the spivs weren’t in the City of London but actually occupied the HBOS management offices at The Mound. It was they, through being overly exposed to wholesale, interbank rates, that made HBOS a target for the speculators.

In this they had been the very antithesis of the traditional Scottish banker. And it hasn’t been spivs but blue-chip institutions, with long term investments in both banks, who have been dumping HBOS and RBS shares in recent days.

With his acknowledged acumen in this field, Mr Salmond has tried to put himself at the very epicentre of this crisis but with every day that passed he has looked more and more like a spear carrier in a major production being directed by people altogether more powerful than he.

HBOS and RBS may have their brass plates in Scotland, but the measures needed to cope with the crises afflicting them required action on a scale far outwith the capabilities of one small nation. Mr Salmond’s actions have looked increasingly puny, revealed for what they are — mere whistles in the dark of a global disaster.

And, almost perversely, he has appeared determined to defend to the hilt the current generation of Scottish bankers — or at least those, Scottish or not, now at the top of HBOS and RBS — who have come in for increasing criticism from a whole series of financial and other experts.

With the oil price shooting up and down like a yo-yo, it has already been difficult to see how the SNP can base Scotland’s economic future on North Sea Oil revenues. Gordon Brown, who faces a difficult by-election in his own back yard four weeks today, will be hoping that the banks’ fate — unhappy and unsettling though it undoubtedly is — will prove to be another nail in the separatists’ coffin.

telegraph.co.uk
_________________
[img]http://home.att.net/~chuckayoub/black_sabbath/black-sabbath-1970.jpg
[/img]
Black Sabbath - 1970

Corby Boy · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 7:26 pm Post subject:

Help ma boab we're all dooomed! Thats me a unionist now! Wink

Shagpile · This is Ma' Life! Joined: 03 Jan 2006 Posts: 793

Aventinian · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2008 1:12 pm Post subject:

Holebender · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

Point of ordure... Alex Salmond has been quoted in the past as saying if he didn't believe Scotland would be more prosperous as an independent country he wouldn't support independence. You may withdraw your remark at any time.
_________________
"My instinct is to agree with your opinion of his verse, but I've never so much as glanced at it." - agentmancuso

Aventinian · Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 9:52 pm Post subject:

macnumpty · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 9:43 am Post subject:

Except the UK has proven itself to be at the mercy of global economic trends in the same way that everywhere else is... so the UK's alleged prosperity (which when you scratch the surface, is something of an illusion) is at risk. Add to that the possibility that more than a quarter of a century of Reagan-Thatcherite economic and social policies have arguably left ordinary people more exposed to the current weaknesses in the economy than any other country in the EU-27, and your argument stops holding water altogether. What do you do if the United Kingdom isn't prospering?

Frankly, Av, I think you'd rather Scotland were an economic desert subservient to the United Kingdom, than equipped with the powers its government needs to take its own decisions and respond to the problems facing Scottish people in the most appropriate way.
_________________
(\_/)
(О.о)
(> < )
^ ^ This is Bunny. Bunny wishes that he could read, so he could read the Our Scotland Blog.

Holebender · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:57 am Post subject:

Holebender · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:59 am Post subject:

For anyone who wishes to compare the UK's "prosperity" to that of other parts of the world... https://www.cia.gov/library/publi...-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

You'll have to look very near the bottom of the list to find the UK.
_________________
"My instinct is to agree with your opinion of his verse, but I've never so much as glanced at it." - agentmancuso

Runaway Weegie · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:14 pm Post subject:

Neil · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 12:36 pm Post subject: