DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

THERE ARE OCCASIONS in the news of our world when we have to be careful in whom we confide. There is, of course, the local policeman, Mr Stephenson, or his best friend Detective Yates, whom everyone knows will be rocks of trustworthiness and good, old fashioned sense. Then there is the newsagent, Mr Murdoch, and his flame-haired, much younger “companion”, Mrs Brooks and her invalid, unsupportive henchman Mr Coulson.

ALL OF THESE PEOPLE MAKE UP the rather curious assemblage of souls who inhabit the close circle of 10 Downing Street with our goody-goody two-shoes PM, a chap who enjoys “a challenge” and a “good game”; the knockout whist being played at the moment is leading to discards beyond anyone’s idea of the maximum. Cameron is having his friends “knocked out” of the game before the slime gets to him. One cannot help thinking that, if the summer does not provide the much-needed silence, he will be looking for someone high up to take a fall, and, given that the police are resigning of their own accord, moving fingers are slowing down and starting to point at the pleasant visage of Home Secretary Theresa May, who is already hated by almost everyone who comes into contact with her.

THUS IF CAMERON SURVIVES THIS it is because he is not as floppy-dopey as he looks and/or he has “proper” intelligent chaps who are loyal to him. The last week, and the next week in particular, have and will show that this current government is as corrupt as we have had since the glory days of the sixties. Those who may have thought that Cameron was any different to the useless, money- and land-hugging Tories of the past before Margaret Thatcher must have shit in their eyes. Which may not be a disadvantage to them as they survey the political landscape.

LIKE IN THE VOICEOVER OF SOME MELODRAMATIC TV SERIES. just when we think that all is fine and that we are getting on with our neighbours, our children are in bed, snug and safe, there is that restless feeling that makes us turn over once, then twice, or even thrice, on our soft, cool pillows, trying to settle down before we go to sleep. What, we may think, does tomorrow bring?

TIED UP IN DEBT

AMUSING AS IT IS TO WATCH PORTUGAL’S politicians attempting to deal with a crisis, it is nevertheless difficult to forget that the solutions the government has found to do so are downright daylight robbery from the average people, particularly those who earn the least. The latest measure, announced in a press conference yesterday, is that the lowest-rate pensioners, who receive around 218 Euros (£190) per month if they are lucky, and those who earn less than 550 Euros (£500) – a considerable number of the young people who actually have a job – will still have to pay the special “Christmas tax” this year “as a loan” to the government, which will be “repaid in full”, it was gleefully announced, “in most cases”, in 2012, at a date to be established.

MOST PEOPLE HERE KNOW THAT Portuguese politicians, in keeping with the characteristics of the Portuguese race, would rather eat their own babies than give anyone any money back, so the prevailing glumness is because the next two Christmases will not be as merry as they once were.

YET SOME SOLUTIONS FOUND for the crisis abound in good sense and far-sightedness, if not decorum. This is perhaps the case of the measures announced yesterday by the new Minister for Agriculture, the Sea, the Environment and Territorial Administration (I kid you not), the good lady Professor Assunção Cristas. Under her “Cool Air” initiative, there will be untold savings for the country by turning off the air conditioning in the ministerial offices between the 1st of June and the 30th of September.

THOSE OF US WHO HAVE WORKED in the stinking, polluted hole that is downtown Lisbon in the summer will know that the average temperature in July or August is a sweat-dripping 34º Centigrade, made even less tolerable by the cramped, insect- and rat-infected, non-Feng Shui premises of most public buildings.

YET HELP IS AT HAND. The canny minister has unusually foreseen the problem and anticipated a solution. Male civil servants will be allowed to work without wearing a tie during these months, which will, according to law teacher Cristas, make it possible to allow an increase of temperature of about “three to four” degrees.

GIRLIE CRISTAS, WHO WAS BORN IN AFRICA and represents the CDS-PP, the only party representative of the extreme right in the Portuguese parliament, obviously knows how to deal with temperature. Yet when asked yesterday by one of those rare journalists who question their leaders in Portugal as to whether the heating would be turned off in the winter, and the clerks would come to work in coats, she declined to answer.

MY SUGGESTION FOR BOOSTING TEMPERATURE over the winter months would be as simple as the minister’s for the summer. Men could go without ties in the summer, and female clerks could take their skirts and blouses off in the winter. This would have the dual advantage of keeping the temperature up, and steaming over the windows in ministerial offices, so no one would be able to see what was going on inside this humungous ministry.

(My picture shows the recommended dress code for male ministerial civil servants in Portugal the last time anyone actually did any work.)

THE END OF THE WORLD

NEWS OF THE END OF the News of the World has provoked both glee and gnashing of teeth among analysts, twits and the chattering classes in general. Obviously, the end of a Sunday newspaper that has lasted 168 years and has recently been selling five million hard copies every week (their claim of 7.5 million must include the online edition) is a disaster for our press system in general, but an opportunity with a big O for other unscrupulous (read “enterprising”) publishers in their race to fill the gap.

“MILLIONS CAN’T BE WRONG” was a slogan often used by cunning advertisers in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties when our current consumer society was taking its baby steps, and this was usually a guarantee, for “thinking types”, that the product was piss-poor beyond redemption and thus to be touched only with the proverbial barge pole. To some extent this is true of the NOTW, which had to commit crimes to grant these millions what they were looking for.

THE MILLIONS, HOWEVER, who regularly bought Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World were perhaps not in a mood to be right or wrong, but merely to be amused by reading the nation’s best scandal sheet, exposing gay orgies involving vicars, result fixing at cricket matches, political faux pas, corruption at the highest level and generally letting us know who was shagging whom, and sometimes how often, how and where. Should there be anyone in the dark as to the business of this august organ, I suggest a sneak peek at www.newsoftheworld.co.uk where all will be revealed, as they sometimes say.

I WAS NEVER AN AVID reader of this type of newspaper, but nevertheless I feel it is a shame to see tradition going the way of all flesh. “We must all take responsibility for this”, stated Janet Street Porter on TV on Loose Women yesterday. “We buy these papers and we love them,” she went on, and the newspaper editors simply provide us with what we want and deserve, even if they have to be deceitful or even criminal to get it.

AS THERE IS A SLIGHT CHANCE that David Cameron, in being personal friends with the harridan Rebekah Wade, editor at the time of all the illegal activity, and in employing (and defending) Andrew Coulson, equally involved in authorising phone hacking (and committing perjury over it) may also be dragged down through this scandal, my reaction is one of horror. How can David Cameron be anything but as pure and innocent as the driven snow? Surely 11 million people who voted Tory can’t be wrong?

ÇA PLANE POUR MOI

I SHOULD PERHAPS BEGIN BY STATING that I have no particular wish to “diss”, as our young skateboarding and rapping community says nowadays, the great nation of Canada or its apologetic and pleasant people, although it would be easy to do so, as they insist on setting themselves up as targets to be popped at like slow-moving ducks on a fairground stall.

THE GREAT WHITE NATION has been favoured over recent centuries as a happy place to usher off the princes of Wales, who have often been troublesome young whippersnappers eager to grab at the throne, as was the case with Edward VII, gnawing at the heels of, or pulling at or hiding under the skirts of his mother the grand Victoria. Canada, then, has been a place to “send the lads off to drink and play”.

AND INDEED IT WAS WITH THIS INTENT that the present princely visit to Canada was arranged and planned; no one among the several entourages knew that William would in the meantime have become a husband. Thus the Royal Protocol has been faced with a problem: should one go ahead with the trip, which was planned to show “our Wills” skiing, sledging, speaking “French”, helicoptering and rescuing Eskimos from the jaws of walruses, eating seal dung and generally “getting it on” with the chaps who otherwise have to have their balls frozen for eleven months of the year? The decison was that cancellation would be wrong.

SCUPPERING THE EVENT HOWEVER, is the girlie and no doubt sweet-smelling presence of touchy-feely, walking-Laura-Ashley-advert the Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate “the” Middleton. Now, judging by the reaction of the screeching banshees and harridan cries of Canadian females, all they want is Kate; our proper future leader, the stolid, wooden, dull, thick-headed William, has been obfuscated by this glamour puss.

AND AT ESSENCE THIS IS THE PROBLEM of the Habsburgs. When was there last a decent mannish man at the helm? When one looks back over recent times we have to go back to Charles II, or possibly his son James II, in the late XVII century, to find a man who could tell his wife what to do and to shut up. Since then we have not had a decent man about the house – either they have been told what to do by their wives whilst kings or just shuffled off into a corner and ignored, like the future Charles III while husband to the murdered Diana Princess of Wales.

AT LEAST PRINCE WILLIAM IS BEING ignored in Canada, where, apparently, television is still in black and white and has a four-second time delay for “live” pictures to come to the BBC, and it is more or less always dark, at least mentally and intellectually. Whatever takes place over this tour it will not be a mould for future performances by this duo. Otherwise one may easily understand how William, like his father before him, could get fed up of his cutie wife outdoing him.

THAT SUMMER FEELING

DESPITE THE FACT THAT summer is upon us and under normal circumstances we might expect Britain should be more concerned about watching cricket and tennis and the price of strawberries, Portugal and Greece should be roasting sardines and slaughtering goats, respectively, and guzzling wine, in both cases, and Syrians should be doing nothing, as usual, the situation in these once mighty nations is far from easy as the dreaded crucial Thursday creeps towards us.

Que Syria, Syria

Presisent Bashar AL-Assad was elected head of Syria in 2000 after his father, the previous democratically-elected president, died. The job had been democratically lined up for his older brother, who died in car accident, which made the Syrian parliament have to lower the age requirements for being president to precisely Bashar’s age, so that everything would be “legal”. As an ophthalmologist, one might have expected Bashar to have a little more foresight in his policies when he noticed what was going on in the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya, which for many years was a single nation with Syria. Tomorrow the pro-democracy protesters, or “Islamic fundamentalists”, or “paid assassins”, or “mad dog criminals”, depending on how one sees the world, intend to hold their greatest movement of the last 106 days.

Elbow Greece

Minnesota-born Georgios Papandreou, the Greek PM, and son and grandson of previous Prime Ministers of Greece – a fact that shows that remarkable coincidences sometimes take place even in democracies – must have learned something from spending most of his life in the USA, Canada, the UK and Sweden, because on becoming prime minister the first thing he did was to honestly announce the state of Greek finances and debt. This led to the first collapse, and so, in a way, he is responsible for the mess. However, what he did not learn in these countries was a sense of democracy, given that the only member of his PASOK party who voted against his austerity measures earlier today has been expelled from his party and will thus lose his seat in parliament.

Allerta Portugalikos

My pun might be lost on those who have not had the benefit of a classical education, but there is very little I can do about that. Pedro Manuel Mamede Passos Coelho, the debonair, matching-tie-and-handkerchief new Portuguese PM and head of the Social Democrat “orange” Party, appears to possess some dignity. However, in a complete volte-face typical of politicians the world over, even before his government has been fully sworn in, he has just announced a special once-only “austerity income tax”, something against which he argued violently when in opposition, and which has not been used as an emergency measure since the time of the hated former PM and president Mário Soares. The outrage caused by this announcement is a rare case of a political honeymoon being over before anyone got their knickers off.

David and Uriah

Yet betrayal and u-turns are best seen at work in the hands of the recent master of these things, our very own David Cameron, cousin to Queen Elizabeth and direct descendant of King William IV. Cameron is also an unelected prime minister, depending upon the support of Nick Clegg and his lily-livered Liberals to stake his claim to office. Yet Cameron is acting as if Clegg does not exist (as is the Liberal Democrat party), pushing though a raft of ultra right economic policies and only conceding to the LibDems in their more fluffy and wooly demands, such as allowing homosexual men to hold hands in the street and to take away CCTV cameras from the doors of wine bars.

PUBLIC AWARENESS OF THE CYNICISM involved in Cameron’s approach is only just becoming apparent; tomorrow will see the largest anti-government protest in Britain since the 1970s, involving 750,000 public sector workers going on a one-day strike as a reaction to the news that their pensions will have to be cut in order to make them viable. This is after increasing student fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in order to allow students to “get a better deal”; after reducing government grants to local councils to less than 20% of what they were five years ago in order “to allow councils to provide better services”; after threatening to sell half of National Health Service provisions to private companies in order “to streamline the service” and give more efficiency “to everybody”; and proposing to reduce prison sentences by 50% in order to “save money” and “produce fairer justice”.

FORTUNATELY, IN THE UNITED KINGDOM WE HAVE an educated middle-class and a responsible, prying press that will not kowtow to politicians, and so the latter two measures were fiercely contested and the government had to back-track, or “listen to the people and respond”, as Cameron put it. As Cameron likes listening so much he will no doubt have his ear to the ground tomorrow.

IN THE OTHER THREE COUNTRIES facing a difficult Thursday neither of these elements are present. Friends of mine sometimes say I am a little harsh on politicians; by comparison this is true. But one single measure in each case in Greece, Spain and Portugal has been enough to ruin the economy. In each case I believe that the ministers responsible were well-meaning, but were as stupid and short-sighted as any Arab despot. In order to stimulate tourism, in a country with a lot of islands and sea with fish in it, the Greek government reduced taxation on charter boats to almost nothing about twenty years ago. The idea was that many entrepreneurs would invest in this profitable and expanding area of tourism. Am I alone in seeing what would happen?

PERHAPS NOT, AS I KNOW OF AT LEAST one journalist who saw what was coming down the pike. Alike laws in Portugal and Ireland had a similar result: in order to stimulate literary writing, both Ireland and Portugal exempted “writers” or “intellectual workers” from income tax (or reduced it to 5% in some cases). No minister ever bothered to define what a “writer” or “intellectual” was. The result in both cases was that hundreds of thousands of independent professional workers such as doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, film directors, actors, real estate brokers, financial advisors and translators – all of whom earning top wages even on a European scale – declared their income as “intellectual work” or “writing” (one article a year in a trade journal would be enough) and were thus spared thousands and thousands of Euros, Escudos and Irish Pounds in tax.

THE GOVERNMENTS OF THESE countries threw away tax income through an ill-thought-out policy. In the Greek case thousands of top-of-the-range yachts have been declared “charter boats” (one paying guest a year will do) and the professionals channel all their tax returns into the “charter business”, even if their main income is being a lawyer. This is a real example of governments getting it wrong; the easy way to recover the lost revenue  and get out of the mess is to increase income tax for the lower classes by 5% or so, or VAT by 11%, or to reduce wages by 20%, as in Greece. Or all three, thereby, whether through error or design, shifting the weight of tax from the upper middle class professionals to the lowest earners. People are protesting on the streets as it is; I imagine that if they knew and understood how their leaders make such stupid mistakes they would be a lot crosser.

BOOZE OIKI

“A WEEK IN POLITICS IS A LONG TIME”, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously stated in 1964, but that intrepid leader never had to put up with European politics, after having experience of which he may have said that a week was a long, baffling bore. Current Prime Minister Davy Cameron will now certainly know all about that, having spent a European Union Summit meeting trying to convince our northern European cousins and our other amis, amigos and amici that giving more money to Greece will just make things worse and that any problem is not Britain’s fault.

TODAY’S SUNDAY TIMES, in presenting interesting opinion articles by Rod Liddle and Matthew Campbell, shares Cameron’s attitude towards the current parlous state of affairs in the birthplace of European civilization. Liddle, particularly, points out that giving money to the Greeks is like giving an alcoholic crates of beer and making them promise to stop drinking.

THE GREEKS THEMSELVES SEEM LITTLE CONCERNED about their situation, continuing, as Liddle also points out, to Bouzouki away after lunch and dinner, dancing on the plates they ritually smash instead of washing them and using them again, although I would add that for the less traditional, younger anarchist Greeks, the Bouzouki music has been replaced by this week’s number one in the Greek charts, Jessie J’s “Price Tag” and its anthem-like, ”Why is everyone so serious? It's not about the money, money, money / We don't need your money, money, money / We just wanna make the world dance, ...”

MATTHEW CAMPBELL’S MORE SERIOUS ARTICLE interviews former Greek finance minister Stefanos Manos, who despairs of Greece’s situation and cannot understand why the “Germans” (sic) do not see what the problem is and/or that there is no solution. I will not reproduce his article point by point, but, rather fashionably for me, set out the keywords and expressions: corruption at all levels, unbelievably excessive bureaucracy, well-paid “ghost jobs”, life pensions for members of parliament after only two terms of office, government and local councils building up massive, never paid utility and transport bills, freebies and perks for everyone in public administration, enormous “adaptation” payouts to politicians who return to civil society. The list goes on.

IGNORANCE BY “GERMANS” MAY BE one reason why Greece is not being sorted out by the European union, and I imagine the same lack of knowledge explains why some British politicians also think that Portugal can be saved by an injection of money. When I read this article about Greece this morning I almost believed I was reading about Portugal, as everything written in it applies to this country.

Besides this I would add 18 days of public holidays (including the days taken when a holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, automatically making the previous or following day a holiday), a whole month’s obligatory paid holiday for all contracted workers, fourteen month’s annual salary, universal rights to six months’ paid absence on “sickness” grounds, inability by the state to collect taxes from the professional classes and a black economy that probably outweighs the official one.

WHEN ABSENCE, DISOBEDIENCE, INCOMPETENCE AND LATENESS are not considered justifiable reasons for dismissal one can understand why there is little incentive for the people to work; contrast this with Luxembourg, where the Portuguese are considered exemplary employees, or the States of Jersey, where most workers in the restaurant and hotel business are Portuguese and are extremely highly regarded.

But in these places they are well paid, in the former, and hardly paid at all, in the latter, making their money on tips and productivity bonuses. With an obligatory fixed-wage 35-hour week, with no overtime allowed by law, even taxi drivers have no incentive to work extra hours, as they earn their wage at the end of the month (unless they work with the taximeter off), and waiters might as well look away when they are beckoned to our tables – the best thing that can happen to them is for the restaurateur to go bankrupt, as their redundancy payments would do far more than compensate them.

(My picture is an example of private enterprise at work in Portugal. This is the front door of a furniture shop in one of the busiest central shopping districts in Lisbon, the city with the greatest number of shops in Europe. It may be difficult to read, (I will get a better photo soon) but the timetable states: Opening time - 10 am to 7 pm (Entrada do pessoal, 10.00 horas às 19.00 horas); and underneath, Lunchtime – 12.30 to 4 pm (período do almoço, 12.30 às 16 horas). On Saturdays, when people might want to look at and buy furniture, the shop is open from 10 to 12.30. When I was at the shop recently the owner told me business had been very bad of late. Now why might that be?)

I’LL BE BACK

THE RATHER OLDER ENGLISH meaning of this term is perhaps lost on the youth of today, who, while not fully against a bit of shirt-lifting and sodomy, are not wholly in touch with the term regularly in use at schools such as those attended as children by our present political governors and then and thus meaning “I will take it up the arse this time, and then it’s my go”.

GOOD CHAPPIE KEN “FAG-ASH” CLARKE, who happened to go to one of these bum-snugging schools after receiving a grant because he was “very talented”, seems to have gifted a goal to the dullards in “Mister” Ed Miliband’s Labour Party mish-mash of failed primary school teachers, stuttering union representatives, part-time Scouts leaders, bingo-callers and general charabanc organizers who are keen on a march t’ capital and t’ call order upon t’Tories. In a radio interview Clarke announced the most idiotic proposals for changes in justice and sentencing, and it is suspected that David “the” Cameron was dragged in to plop him out of his self-made plughole.

EVERYONE WHO LIKES A GOOD CONFRONTATION, particularly when one does not have to go to work, will relish the event of the "general" strike on the 30^th of June, when the toothless and long-, level-, and evenly-accented vowel classes of England will come down to give people like Clarke a “duffin’ over”. I will be in my usual haven of toasted crumpets and slowly and evenly spread raspberry jam, watching on TV, or perhaps on my computer on my yacht.

BUT THE TERM stated in the headline, as I have used it here, means that I will be back to this issue soon. In the meantime there are things to which I should grant some care; I’ll pay the due attention to Clarke when I can.