The threshold - Italy

I've climbed through the Alps. The world feels different up there... all silent and timeles beneath peaks where snow still shines in the sunlight. I've ridden over the Colombiere, Roselend, up the road to Saint Bernard, summits and passes steeped with the rich history of European cycling, lessons in patience learned on your way up above two thousand metres. After Saint Bernard the road angles down, you see the Valle d'Aosta opening below as gravity takes a hold and starts hauling you down, pulling you faster. Faster. Faster the tarmac tumbles under you, the corkscrew unwinding so that the road invites you to accelerate... pines, abandoned restaurant...to accelerate down into the turns, daring you carry more speed into each new bend, stay later on the brakes so that in the dying metres you're sticking out your chest to try and catch a little more drag, leaning in and out of the bend... upright again as the road goes straight down... crucifix, fountains... everything jumping out from the corners of your eyes, the lands below shining in misty sunlight as the speed gains, pulls water from your eyes, the valley walls opening to let you out after almost an hour of pure descent, gliding down into a summer's morning... in Italy.

Newly downgraded by Moody's to "Baa2". I like to imagine Marcus Aurelius being told by a young buck in a suit that he's been made a "Baa2". The timing of the downgrade couldn't have been more political, a matter of days before an Italian bond auction, one more proof that credit rating agencies are not the objective market observers that their profitability hangs upon. Cycling in Italy the surprise is not so much that the country faces economic difficulties, it's more that the economy ever got so strong to begin with. On the roads I'm passed by groups of old men, a dozen of them in matching lycra and bronze skin, pedaling up towards hills where later I pass them snapping cards down upon a cafe table. The cafes and beaches are full, the most regular signs of commerce are stalls selling peaches at the roadside, the occasional rusting bicycle that rolls by with a crate of courgettes stuck over the back wheel.

And yet Italy still works. Apartment blocks are still being constructed in Genoa, a General Electric plant on an industrial stretch of the Tuscan coast is still constructing platforms for oil and gas extraction, foreign number plates still drive in to spend their tourist euros. As with Centre Parks in the UK, as people start taking their holidays closer to home, recession has been good for domestic tourism. At the same time, there are signs of trouble. In a foccaceria, the woman behind the counter puts my €20 note through a machine, raises her eyebrows and nods that counterfeit notes are definitely a problem. In the hills outside Genoa, a Tunisian man with a fruit stall enthuses that "Italy is beautiful!... to visit. To live and work," he smiles, "as a foreigner... is difficult." In Tuscany I'm assured there are no more prostitutes than before on the road from Pisa to Livorno, but with at least one on every junction, to me it seems more present. Italy's street art is as lively as ever, all the usual encouragement to smash fascistas and capitalistas, to rebel, to remember that the Genovese police killed Carlo Giuliani at the G8 protests of 2001, that they beat up a school full of activists in the same week. All through the north I see "No TAV" daubed on walls, I'm told it's a proposed high speed rail link to Lille in northern France. Italians joke that nobody wants to go to Lille anyway... it's comforting to learn it's not only British politicians who have a soft spot for fast, expensive trains at a time when the economy seems to ask for something more.

As ever I'm confronted with a conflict. Travelling by bicycle, with farmers giving you peaches and refusing your money, lends life a feeling that all is well. At the same time, it's clearly not so simple, because if it were then the police brutality, prostitution and government waste would not be the problems that they are. What I like about life by bicycle is its tendency to prove the fundamental goodness in human society, and the fundamental deception behind the cultures of consumerism and fear all too prominent in our societies. That said, there's clearly work to be done in making societies a bit more reflective of the spirit of life on two wheels. 

Speaking to Italians, people obviously believe the wrong work is being done. The government of Mario Monti is well passed its honeymoon, the early days when a grey haired academic, dubbed 'the professor', took charge of a team of technocrats to give politics some post-Berlusconi respectability. After the former president's charges for sex offences, Monti was parachuted in at the behest of the head of state, the equivalent of our queen choosing a successor to a disgraced prime minister. At the time there were raised eyebrows, but it's as the policies become more unpopular that the government's credibility is being questioned. Just as Britain has found itself beset by an aggressive regime of privatisation that didn't figure in any election manifesto, so too are the Italians scratching their heads at the democratic gulf that seems to have opened. Monti himself seems little happier in the role, and with Berlusconi eyeing a return to office, the new man has already said this will be his only term.

As for the policies, they are dismissed as either insignificant or set to effect the wrong people. The billionaires and mafia are being ignored, people anticipate that hard-saving Italians will be left to pick up someone else's bill. Italians demonstrate the remarkable human ability to detect unfairness whenever they are a victim of it. A cafe owner complains, in words that vault a fairly high language barrier, that in today's Italy only the Church has any money. The new government has started to address as much, and the church must now pay taxes on profit-making ventures such as its many commercial properties. Too little, too late summarises the reception, and middle-class Italians seem more concerned by the repeal of a Berlusconi tax break on second home ownership. Unaffordable housing and adults stuck at home with parents make those who have saved for country retreats no more sympathetic. Cash is proving a further bone of contention, and the outlawing of cash transactions above €1000 has been an unwelcome start in clamping down on commonplace evasion of VAT. The verdict varies from this as encroaching government, to discrimination against an old population without plastic in wallets or PINs in heads, and repeat questions about why the government isn't going after Italy's largest firms instead. Market liberals will be little happier. There is talk of opening the pharmacy business to competition and stopping old practices of price protection. Taxi licenses are to be reassessed, with the revocation of licenses that have been sold-on by previous holders. Cabbies in Rome have already begun to make their displeasure known, in the capital the license is enough to secure a mortgage approval from a bank, but even then... nobody believes chemists and cabbies are at the heart of the problem.

It's become a piece of eurozone trivia - Italian debts are bigger than Greek, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish combined. Greek perseverance within the euro is key to keeping the heat off Italy and remaining contenders for the unenviable position as Europe's sickest man. Debt-GDP ratios have also become part of the popularisation of debt culture, Italy has a debt 120% of an annual output... a more terrifying way of saying that Italian debt could be cleared with fifteen months output. Government debt stands at about $2.2 trillion... Italian GDP is about $2 trillion. None of this is to say Italy has no problems, only that if there's a calm or an apocalyptic way of saying something, the mood of our times is to go for apocalypse. Few commentators mention that some of this debt will not mature for half a century, that innovations and inventions will have made the economy a very different place by the time they do. For all the stereotypes put about in the name of selling olive oil and pesto, the truth is Italy is a significant industrial nation. Everything from helicopters to torpedos and dentist chairs to power tools are manufactured here, not to mention the obvious production of automobiles, gourmet foods and designer labels. Italy is not a southern European backwater that may or may not have been admitted too early to the euro, it's an original member of the G7. The 1970s proved that governments do go bankrupt, but bankrupt governments are not in the interests of the markets. Without markets society is in trouble, but without societies that trade, produce and consume... the markets cannot even exist. You can find evidence of as much in gains for the dollar and yen across the last eighteen months, this in spite of Japanese debt rates of 200%, and the US senate constantly having to lift the debt ceiling to permit more borrowing. In uncertain times, markets have no safer bets than large, functioning economies... just don't expect them to shout about it.

So is Italy doing fine? In terms of gelato for a touring cyclist... definitely. In terms of a robust economy... perhaps not. My road is about to take me out of the EU, into Croatia, and via a city that underlines the foremost Italian problem. In Trieste the local newspaper is covering a McKinsey report that has found the city to be Europe's oldest, with 27% of the population older than 65. Italy's declining birth rates and generous pensions have created a somewhat top-heavy pyramid scheme. Monti's government has already raised retirment ages, prompting predictable resentment in those who have seen the finish shift just as they were sticking out their chests to cross the line. At the younger end of society, the extension of working lives exacerbates an already acute lack of jobs. Italians stress that national debt is a government problem, families here balance their books, and household debt is all but non-existent. Of course the complaint is relevant, but if generous pensions and state empoloyment has bankrolled this nation of savers, it's ironic that Italians can simulatenously be found to complain that the state is too big.

As with all the countries I will cycle through, the Italians need to make some big decisions in the coming years. The root of the problem, however, is how best to balance our sovereign monetary systems with unstoppable changes in populations. Whatever decisions are made, the whisperings of the free market will not provide the best advice... I didn't ask an insurer if cycling to Istanbul would require travel insurance.

Left turns - France

France is exactly the same. Completely different. With the Tour de France just over for another year, you can sense the national respect for cycling in the distance with which cars overtake, the patience with which they wait for safe passing opportunities. In France, a citizen remains a citizen even on a bicycle, you have to unlearn the mentality of road vermin that becomes engrained in London. I buy my pastries in the boulangerie, walk next door and eat them at a table with the coffee I buy from the cafe. It still makes me happy each time a cafe owner assures me that of course this arrangement is fine. You see it in the big, blue elephant that advertises the national car wash chain, in the tractor magazines on sale in the newsagent, and in the shabby, lived-in countryside a million miles from Britain's increasingly gentrified villages, where house prices skyrocket only to lie empty when the new owners are not on holiday. As I cycle slowly up a hill, a white van pulls alongside with the window winding down. In London this tends to be a bad omen, in France the driver starts to shout 'allez... allez... allez'... pumping his fist in the air like a directeur sportif with his rider going under the flamme rouge. As always, France seems to have a little more of its innocence intact.

I know how all this sounds. Orwell always made fun of the British middle classes for their ability to feel patriotic about almost anywhere but Britain. He has a point. Ten days ago I was cycling through Suffolk, rolling my eyes at the Union Jacks fluttering above lawns. I knew then that in not long I'd be riding through France, completely at ease with the tricolor in every town. And yet I'm comfortable with my preference; republics and equality strike a chord with me that empires and kingdoms never will... the British establishment will have to meet me in the middle if it wants a little more of my patriotism. It goes without saying that France is far from perfect... an 18% showing for Marianne Le Pen underlines an uglier side of the traditional, in the seaside town of Dieppe teenagers ride scooters with loud exhausts that piss off everyone but the rider. The outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in his last ditch election effort to court far-right votes showed that France - like anywhere - knows exactly how to betray its founding ideals. When you're only pedalling through, however, all this has a habit of feeling like someone else's problem.

It is not surprising that the election of Francois Hollande still dominates the political landscape - the new president remains an unknown entity. From Britain's arm's length you could sense as much in our own election coverage; before the election we had Hollande the unassuming 'pizza boy' who insisted on riding his scooter to the office, promised to take a pay-cut, and who had a journalist partner dubbed 'Twittweiler'. It was easy to create the personality, but now the invented personality of likable underdog needs elaboration. It was depressing that the first step in painting a picture of the man was not political scrutiny, but a look at Hollande's messy separation from former presidential candidate and leading socialist, Segolene Royal. The fractures that this might create within the French left have made for pretty irresistible political gossip.

The French seem little more certain about him than the British. A woman in a suit sits down to the next table outside a Paris cafe, just off the metro from La Defense, Paris' finance district. She shrugs as she tells me "the French think the crisis will never come... they will do the ostrich and bury their heads." In expensive clothes and a well-paid career she seems to overlook the resentment of people being told that the party is over, when the majority feel they were never invited to begin with. As ever, it's telling to note her apparent remedy to the crisis - cuts and 'streamlined' job losses - are the very things we are told to fear the crisis will bring. In a bar in Pigalle, a young graduate tells me he's happy Hollande won, "he'll be good for France's social divide." But. And he confesses. "I voted for Sarkozy... he's the man to save us from the crisis."

Sarkozy certainly didn't fail to bolster this image on his way out of office. The symbolic but noble "in this together" move whereby Hollande and his cabinet took 33% pay cuts was met with accusations that the increased size of his new cabinet would eat-up any savings. The big government boogeyman remains an effective weapon in the free market arsenal. Hollande maintains that deficit reduction is a priority, but even his supporters question the wisdom in his kept promise to restore a retirement age of 60 after Sarkozy had done the hard, unpopular and dirty work of getting it down from 62.

Perhaps it's this issue that sits at the heart of Hollande's election victory. Of course there is no such as a free lunch, but should twenty-first century lives really be so nasty, brutish and short? If deficits are the most important thing in public policy then there is a case to be made for 62... 65 ... 70. If there is more to life than that - and cycling through France certainly makes it feel like there should be - then 60 means something more than two years, it's like a tiny kick against the End of History, and leftists far from France will be hoping this election is some sort of Reaganomics watershed. This week's meeting with Labour leader Ed Milliband, and talk of a European summit of the centre left, will do nothing to dampen these hopes. It's no shock that the markets have been proportionately unimpressed, dipping as trading resumed the day after Hollande's victory. It's a measure of our Stockholm syndrome that despite general consensus that the unfettered powers of financial markets are ruining our societies, we still hang on those same markets for signs of their approval. You can't escape slavery without upsetting a slave master, and the French deserve credit for refusing to return a brash, unpopular president who threatened financial brimstone without him. Hollande must now hold true to the ideals for which he was elected, and his public must resist the very human tendency whereby we make politicians scapegoats when they cannot be panaceas.

Over the course of a week I ride south, away from the rains of a summer no better than Britain's, though the French don't seem to share our certainty that we have been cursed by the weather. The road starts to kick upwards as I pedal out of society for a while, first into the Jura, with the Alps waiting on the horizon and Italy just beyond. In the picturesque town of Cluny a woman summarises her take on French politics from outside the laundrette. She tells me that she got to a comfortable life from humble beginnings, and with a smile and gentle uncertainty her words cut to the chase of much debate. "I recognise that you can't just help people all the time, but people need support when they can't help themselves... and for this the state is necessary."

Riding out of the summer like no other

“Neo-Victorian boom.” An expression that started to appear around a year ago is becoming something of a feature in writing about the city of London. The FT have gushed about “the world's leading city” as if it were an official contest or accolade, a recent issue of the Economist showed London at dusk, above a headline of “precarious brilliance". So long as the Olympics go off without too many G4S-style glitches, it’s hard to imagine them not strengthening the modern myth that London is developing for itself. Neo-Victorian boom. Apparently.

Look a little closer and all is not so well. In ever more bars, cafes and clubs you find increasingly stern advice to watch your belongings and use the bag hooks… thieves, it would seem, are operating in more and more areas of a city with the highest rate of wealth inequality in the developed world. Boris Johnson, newly returned as Mayor by only 15% of the total electorate, was last month tending to self-promotion in New York, loudly repeating his old pledge that London will not be sterilised. As still more private sector developments lay claim to public space, each with a now-familiar range of prefabricated franchises, Johnson seems to have confused an opposition to sterilisation with affection for London’s stunning inequality.

In all this, there’s an awful lot of newspeak to cut through for those who want the truth. The now well-heeled borough of Hackney was recently celebrating a reduced rate of poverty amongst its residents. The town hall is quieter about the likelihood that this has been caused by a displacement of poor residents who can no longer afford to live in the borough. Across the city the boast of “recession proof” continues to linger like a bad smell. London property prices have indeed remained buoyant, but it’s a moot point that a 7% climb in areas like Marylebone have been enough to bury the stutters in the likes of Dagenham and Romford, London’s emerging banlieu.

The Shard has become a newly popular metaphor for this gulf. London’s latest tallest building waits impatiently for its insides to be wired up, towering over the once low-profile south bank as it does so. Qatari-owned, the Shard has come to represent not only the brash arrogance of the financial sector, but also a tendency towards a city owned by those far away, people whose only concern for London is as an enduring cash cow. The most telling thing, in both name and design, is that the Shard seems remarkably comfortable in appearing outwardly mean. Cycle safety campaigners have highlighted the staggering rate of casualties caused by the Shard’s endless construction traffic, Simon Jenkins fumed that the Shard "has slashed the face of London for ever.'' Mercifully… “forever” is a long time, as is evident in the crumbling ruins of London Wall, the last Roman infrastructure project, completed in the second century to hem-in the city. The wall's ivy-strewn remains are a heart warming evidence that empires bigger than the Qataris have come and gone, together with their monuments... but still… it’s worrying when you have to find comfort through such a long view of history.

In short… and what I’ve been meaning to say all along… is that that it’s time for me to leave. I’ve always traveled by bicycle… around London, around the world, and a handful of times across Europe. It’s across Europe that I’m escaping this time, a ride of some 2500 miles to Istanbul, a route that I last took as a new graduate five years ago. With a financial crisis and a eurozone crisis separating now from then, I’ll go back to my familiar politics by bicycle, slow travel through nations that still wait to either enter or exit the European club, or who try to beat a new path inside of it. As the UK’s attention turns from Leveson and a corrupt media, and looks anew at Libor, HSBC, and a corrupt banking system, I pack my panniers and pump up my tyres, and return to watching Europe from the vantage point of a beat-up, leather saddle.

Quick instructions for a better world

I've hit the road again, probably quite some time later than I should have done so too. Panniers are packed and my Tout Terrain is rolling as reliably as ever towards Istanbul. There's a series of blog posts on the way, a little insight into Europe from the roadside in 2012, before that though, I just wanted to share some more practical thoughts and requests.

I remain unashamedly not for charity, long-standing/suffering readers will need no re-introduction to my ideas on the subject. In short, I know few ways of life more enjoyable than cycling places, the idea that it's a hardship suffered for a worthy cause just doesn't hold true for me. That said, if any of you are looking for worthy causes to give some of your hard-earned to, I'm involved with an amazing charity, cmap, who provide art projects for disadvantaged children in Latin America, and who are now fundraising to get some projects off the ground in the UK too. That cmap are an amazing group of people doing amazing things is pretty unrelated to my cycling away from a wet English summer and Olympic lockdown, via the coast of Croatia, but if you're on the lookout for a charity then they're well worth a punt.

If you personally want to make a difference in the world... I recommend either writing a letter to your MP and (with a few notable exceptions) telling him/her to pull their finger out, switching your energy provider to Ecotricity , or consider Moving Your Money away from the banks that will take us all to the cleaners. Aside from that, try to vote with your money whatever it is you're buying, and don't click on news articles that really shouldn't be in the news.

Anyway... enough of me telling you what to do. Stay tuned for the coming posts, circulate them widely, enjoy the summer.

Dunwich

 Twenty years ago they needed a legend… needed a myth… something to help get it off the ground. They said that couriers had started it, drinking after work on a Friday night, daring one another to ride until they hit the water, until they reached the sea. They had cycled all through the night, and then, with the sun rising they had come to the water at Dunwich, 110 miles away on the Suffolk coast, a place that ten centuries ago had been a booming hub of the wool industry. Like I said… they needed a legend, needed a myth… it’s not true. The guys responsible for the Dunwich Dynamo are not couriers, they never were… I’m proud to count a few of them as friends. They’re a group of guys with their hair starting to thin out on top, with no claim to rock and roll beyond knowing what’s good for the human spirit. They’re the sort of people who seek no credit for their idea, no credit beyond the desire that people enjoy themselves. It was twenty years ago that they created that courier myth… and although it still endures, there’s no need for it any longer… the Dynamo has a legend of its own now. It needs no embellishment.

As the dusk lands you leave London Fields, begin to pick your way from out of the city. Don’t go too soon, it’s easier to follow others through those turnings in the night. You ride out, out through the north eastern sticks of the city, out through the trees of Epping Forest… all two thousand of you with the evening just falling and all the night ahead. At that point it’s just a ride, it’s still only a ride, pedalling through the coming grey, the stop-start traffic and receding concrete.

It’s the night, it’s the night that does it… the road comes alive… a dragon, a dragon takes up the road, and if there’s any one thing that any person riding Dunwich will always remember it’s the trail of lights, that flashing red that winds away in front of you, blinking and flickering and glowing as the darkness comes down. They light lanterns… those friends who started it all two decades ago... they go out in front, leave London hours before the rest of us, tiny jam jars with candles inside of them, glowing yellow, glowing white within the night to mark the turnings you should take, the flame guttering as the wind pushes over the rim of the glass, blowing a sound into the silence. It pushes you on… invisible hand style… the wind is always favourable it seems, coming up from the south and blowing you on along the road. In cycling they say that there are no such thing as tailwinds… only headwinds and good days. Riding to Dunwich happens mostly on good days.

We ride… we all ride… all together, you’re never alone on that road, a whole legion of strangers that you’ve got all the right things in common with. You hear their snippets of conversation as the bats flutter frantically above the road, their serrated wings cutting at the moonlight as you hear the conversation. The bicycle… it sure brings out the best in people… “the thing to do is toast the mustard seeds in a dry pan for a few minutes before you get started” … “it’s really interesting the way the road slopes like that”. Cyclists, people riding bicycles… whatever you want to call them… they sure pay attention to the little things, the tiny bits of nonsense that make a life worth living.

The road comes to you, takes you under the crumbling, crestfallen towers of old churches, takes you down through the hills and into the village of Sible Hedingham. Each year the village hall it stays open all through the night, the villagers serving up soup and flapjacks… flapjacks… damn but after Dunwich you don’t want to see another flapjack for a long time. The hall is packed, lycra and waterproof from wall to wall, some of it crawling inside a sleeping bag, others hunched over a styrofoam cup of soup… you get in the queue, wait your turn, wait your turn… get to the front, the flavours are red or yellow… they call it minestrone or vegetable but the reality is that it just tastes bad, pick your favourite colour and enjoy the warmth on its way down the throat.

After the hall it changes… the sleep comes… comes to take you away, off of the road and into some space above the tarmac… the stars float by above you, tearing the sky apart as they trail like tiny comets back down the road. The other riders they pass you by, packs of them, the road crews… real chain gangs, skintighter than tight… they ride in enfilade, jaws rolling above the handlebars and you hear them coming, the deep rims that dust themselves free of the night like a broom upon a stone step. You hear the hum, the pur of the tyres, and looking down there move your feetyourfeetyourfeet… the wheel ahead and the road rolling under it as the night looms ever onwards in front of you. It takes all kinds… Dunwich draws us all in, every type of rider… each year there’s a man with a large Labrador and an even larger basket… the Labrador curls in the basket and the man drives him through the night, the dog turning round on itself every now and then, sometimes sitting up to yap at the passing bats. You see a girl, a pair of denim shorts and riding a pink Pashley with a wicker basket… her boyfriend puts his hand to her back and pushes her into the incline that’s hanging over us. Let me tell you… if you meet a girl on the Dynamo, or if you ever find one that’ll ride it with you… keep hold of her... she’s special.

It’s the sleep, the sleep is what does it… you don’t get tired in the legs so much as in the head, you start swimming… the lids get heavier and the vision melts. Some of us break from the road, crawl onto a soft lawn of Suffolk and sleep under a tree. I stay awake for the silhouettes… always the silhouettes… I’m a real sucker for the silhouettes, the white moonlight that cuts black shapes from the high stalks of dandelions, cow parsley and bramble thicket… I could look at silhouettes all night long, and as the dawn starts to break and the sky cheers from black to blue it gets better still. You pass out of the final woods, the guard of honour formed by the trees, cracking their branches together like quarter staffs above your head. The countryside opens , opens wide… lets out a yawn and then… and then… there it is, glowing at the end of the road, a giant, warbling ball of red, crimson, warbling and turning like a baby’s mouth screaming at being woken for the new day. The sun screams down the road, flashes by the trail of flickering red so that the chill of the darkness passes and there comes the warmth of the day to takes its place.

Hours of half-light pass slowly, the lanes of Suffolk begin to twist, a central reservation of dusty gravel, kicked up by the tyres ahead so that your eyes sting once with fatigue and twice with the mist of debris that you move through. The day rises, grows bright, and there you see the sun shining through the flowers that line the walls of those roads, high banks of mud cut directly from the hills… cut directly from the hills and lined perfectly with poppies and poppies and poppies, the sun coming through those petals as the flickering lights of the cyclists are switched off and instead we follow that trail of poppies to the sea. The heather of the heath is last of all, that pale purple, the same colour as those burst veins in the legs of the middle aged cyclist, snaking like Alpine switchbacks about the calf and down into the ankle. You move over the heath, the wind dropping for the coming day, a warm smile resting somewhere just behind your lips.

In time it comes. You reach Dunwich a whole lot faster if you set out simply to ride through the night. You just keep riding, that’s all you have to do, forget about the 110 miles and just ride in the company of friends, or in the company of yourself. The beach comes, shingle pulled from the seabed and thrown back down, crashing over on itself as the sun glints off of rims and reflectors and spokes all thrown down on the beach… a sea of bicycles washed ashore from some better place, the tired limbs of all those cyclists stretched out and resting upon the stones. You take off your clothes, step down to the waters, stones pressing on your soles. You jump in… you have to… you have to jump otherwise you’ll never go past the waist. Cold is a state of mind… it’s not cold, it’s euphoria… and beneath those waves, somewhere just above the shingle with your head beneath the waters… right there all life is waiting for you.




This post appears in issue 10 of Boneshaker Magazine

To bail out or be bailed out. Greece and the euro.

Having spent the best part of six months writing, reading and thinking about road design and cycling policy, I’m back to thinking political economy for a moment.

This was brought about largely by the increasing likelihood of Greece leaving the euro, with anti-bailout parties looking set to perform well in next month’s Greek elections.

David Cameron gave an entertaining speech in response to developments, asking for Europe to provide “a committed, stable, successful euro zone” that he doesn’t want any British involvement with anyway. Cameron also proposed the need for “well-capitalised and regulated banks, and a system of fiscal burden sharing” that he has shown no great enthusiasm for introducing within the UK. Bear in mind that our own plan for bringing the banking sector to heel, Project Merlin, is named after a magician.

All this is only context. The most striking thing about the prophecies of doom surrounding Greece is what they omit to mention. Reuters ran a report on the hundreds of billions of euros that a Greek exit will cost the euro zone. The Centre for Economic and Business Research gave an upwards projection of $1tn (€786bn) as the cost of an exit.

Neither mentions that the European Central Bank (ECB) is exposed to half a trillion euros of debt in Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain. The ECB sits on less than €100bn of capital, and €240bn of existing bailouts have obviously failed to move Greece into financial safety. What we have is talk about the potential losses of a Greek exit from the euro, without mention that Greece’s continuing presence in the euro zone is also riddled with losses that have failed to bring any improvements in the situation.

Key to the idea of a Greek exit is that a return to the drachma would bring an approximately 50-70% depreciation against the euro-denominated value of Greek assets. What this does not factor-in is that with unemployment at 21% and the minimum wage down 20%, the fewer monetary units people have, the less important the value of each of those units becomes. A 40% increase in the suicide rate suggests that the Greek population is not exactly being well-served by the status quo.

One of the few positive stories to emerge recently from Greece was its so-called Potato Revolution, in which farmers have begun selling directly to customers, enabling cheaper prices and higher profits for themselves. The good news is that potatoes grow irrespective of currencies, and given the fact that so many Greeks are receiving fewer and fewer euros, preserving those as euros rather than drachma is helping financial institutions rather than people. The less you get out of an economy, the less you suffer when it loses money.

The problem for the ECB now is that it needs Greece. The anthropology of markets is rarely discussed, but the mantra of financial discipline needs a pariah. A Greek presence in the Eurozone maintains the veneer of a system that is hard-going, but that ultimately works. If Greece leaves the euro then it will be evidence of the fact, only recently acknowledged, that such a thing is possible at all. The experience of Iceland, with 3% post-crisis growth, suggests that the Greeks could stand to benefit from bailing on the Eurozone, rather than being bailed out by it. The ECB will then have to grapple with increased financial pressure on Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, with each of these nations no longer convinced of the permanence of the single currency.

A final consideration worthy of mention is that of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), set up to help Greece (and others) with debt obligations. This week saw Der Spiegel begin discussing the possibility that it will be diverted to help Greece’s creditors in the event of a default. This returns us to a scenario in which banks are let-off the hook for bad lending, even after the debts themselves have been formally defaulted upon by the initial debtor. What will become clear in such circumstances is that priority was never a rescue of the Greeks, but further taxpayer subsidy for the failures of Europe’s banking institutions.

If Greece does leave the euro, the most significant result will not be the numbers and percentage points attached to that event, but the statement that options exist outside the religion of international financial institutions. For the Greeks neither path will be pleasant, but some courses of action are less hopeless than others.

London voter turnout and inflatable ballot boxes

This is a piece I wrote recently for the London Review of Books. Voter turnout in the forthcoming London elections is likely to be less than half, the obvious response to this problem is, of course, an inflatable ballot box. Whoever said that politicians were out of touch?

In the event that LRB don't want it... here it is.

Last week is the start of the official campaigns period for the London mayoral election. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone seem to be trading places on 49%-51% of the vote, which is quite exciting, until you consider that half of the franchise won’t even be voting.

London is notorious for low turnout. Whether it’s because people are too poor or too rich, for one reason or another, in election terms the majority don’t seem to care. This trend is no less apparent when the election is for the devolved position of London mayor, Boris Johnson won the 2008 election with what was considered a ‘high’ turnout, 45% of 5,419,913 eligible voters turned up on polling day. Whichever colour comes out on top on May 3^rd, presiding over London for four years, their share of the vote will be less than half the number of people who just don’t give a shit.

This year, London Elects, the body responsible for the election, are tackling voter apathy head-on. Residents of the capital will be treated to a London-wide tour from a giant, inflatable ballot box. You couldn’t write it, and we wait and see whether children will be able to bounce up and down on it, but as far as politics is concerned, only the comical value stops this initiative being deeply depressing. Apathy is neglected as a political viewpoint, even if it is easily written-off as inherently apolitical. If people are given the opportunity to improve the prospects for their futures, and they decline that opportunity, the chances are it’s because they don’t expect their input to have any effect. Springing to mind is the old saying that no matter who you vote for, the government still gets in. It’s not just a socio-economic state of mind, rich or poor, there is a widespread vision of government as either enemy, oaf, or irrelevant.

Inflatable ballot boxes deal with the issue as if voting were something that people lazily neglect, or absent-mindedly forget. The reality is something much more telling, and in an honest, soul-searching mayoral term, the most pressing item on the agenda would be why most people just don’t care. Whatever the London turnout on May 3^rd, perhaps a useful statute for the future might be that once things stoop to the level of giant, inflatable ballot boxes, it’s time for something more than just an election.

Breaking News - Goldman Sachs executive discovers investment banking isn't ethical

It’s not been the best of weeks for Goldman Sachs. The share price lost recent gains, but remains stable around $1.20, the market capitalisation remains above $60billion, they’re still the world’s most powerful investment bank. But the brand is suffering. With the help of the New York Times, outgoing executive, Greg Smith, broadcast his resignation letter to the world, criticising a “toxic culture” in which Goldman treats its customers with contempt, and prioritises an unsustainable pursuit of profits. From Tories to mortgage-backed bonds, the word “toxic” has obviously become the chosen metaphor for anything ominous.

Most people might be unsurprised to hear the morality of an investment bank called into question, and that’s perhaps part of what makes the fuss surrounding Smith’s letter curious. His is not so much a Damascene conversion as a nostalgia that Goldman once was, and could be, so much more. The resignation letter talks of Smith's “privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet” (still leaving the door open for the existence of hedge funds on other planets), the pride with which he featured in Goldman’s recruitment campaigns at university campuses. It is hardly a tirade against financialisation, or against the undemocratic chaos that markets foist upon society. His is more a plea that it should be done calmly and responsibly, so that investment banks can keep doing it, and have fewer recruitment difficulties. We must assume rival executives across the industry will be happy with the reputational damage done at Goldman. It’s hard to imagine Smith having problems finding new employment, and to be cynical, one could suggest that his personal brand will prosper as the world’s foremost moral banker.

None of this is particularly troubling, finance is hardly renowned as a world of high morality and deep soul-searching. What is more distressing is the kudos Smith seems to have been granted for his honesty, from The Guardian to Rolling Stone, with not a scrap of praise withheld for his leaving the fundamental principles of the industry entirely untouched. For Goldman it’s a PR dilemma, for investment banking it’s a great victory.

Suspended Activity at This is not for Charity.

Greetings all, I come to you with a combination of good news and sad tidings. The sad tidings are that my recent blog inactivity will be continuing until after May 3rd. I will be leaving you to wade through the lies alone, without regular doses of what I like to think of as my unique brand of loving cynicism.

The good news is that this is because I'm busy. There are many reasons for this (one of which is successful progress on getting my book published), but the short answer is that I've become an urban transport geek. In this capacity, I've thrown in my lot with Londoners on Bikes, who are working hard to mobilise and unify London's cyclists into a voting bloc for the London mayoral elections.

The numbers are compelling. Transport for London (TfL) have long-estimated that there are 500,000 bicycle journeys each day in the city. 20,000 votes represents 1% of the electorate, and Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are trading places on 49% to 51% of the vote. This means, crucially, that cycling votes could decide the election.

The immediate response to this is often that 'there are more important things than cycling', a statement with which I must (grudgingly) agree, however, the Mayor of London does not control these things. The Mayor of London (unfortunately) has no real control over wages, housing, taxation, education, health, pensions or just about any other important issue you could care to name. The Mayor, however, is the chairman of Transport for London, and as such has real power to implement a positive vision for the city's transport policy. When you vote for the mayor of London, you vote for how you want the city to move. In as much as this, you can either vote progressively, for bikes, pedestrians and public transport, or you can vote regressively, for cars. Vote for cars, and you are voting less for how you want the city to move, and more for how you want the city to crawl, cough and become generally more irate.

As far as the candidates line up, Jenny Jones of the Green Party is likely to remain the preferred first choice of Londoners on Bikes. It's Jenny who we think has the greatest vision for a city based on sustainable transport. The election is decided with an alternative voting system, and so, if Jenny doesn't win a majority of the votes your second preference is counted instead. Presently, we're recommending a vote of 1. Jenny and 2. Ken, who, amongst a host of positive ideas on cycle policy and pedestrianising central areas, has said that he will makes Jenny his cycling minister.

The ideal scenario is that Boris will throw his hat into the ring, and start taking bikes, and the idea of a liveable urban space, more seriously. Thus far, unfortunately, we have been faced with little more than a "smoothing the flow" catechism, and the utopian dream of millions of cars moving effortlessly around the city. It's a square peg in a round hole, and the answer is that cycling can't continue to grow unless it is given a greater presence in budgets and planning. Last year we saw 16 cyclists killed on London's roads (up from ten the year before), and the election is about preserving a status quo of urban motorways on which cyclists are encouraged but not supported, or trying to make a positive change.

Visit the website at www.londonersonbikes.org.uk , sign up with your support, see how you can get involved, email people, talk about it in the pub, and generally spread the word.

Going Slow

I wrote a piece for the London Review of Books... it's a short take on the fact that cyclists seem to keep getting killed in London, whilst the authorities seem to keep doing nothing about it. It's as if cyclists are inconveniencing Boris Johnson and Transport for London by constantly winding-up dead and creating a sticky situation for all concerned.

Anyway... condolences to the friends and family of Henry Warwick, London cycle courier killed last week. Confused shrugs for the bureaucrats of Transport for London, who said that more people cycling would make cycling safer... Y'know... safety in numbers like... just as you'd tell a pack of seals with a killer whale in the waters, or a group of buffalo with a lion hanging around them, or any other group of beings faced with a predator that is intent on their demise. Comforting.

Anyway, the blog post is here.

Inflation and religious economics

Happy new year everyone, as an early treat for 2012, I've put forward a little of the political thinking behind our current 5% rate of inflation. It's the most significant thing not being talked about in politics, and basically, it means in simple terms that you're going to have to work harder to afford the same stuff. It also means that your wages, savings and pensions are losing value even as you read this, so hurry up,

Anyway... have a look and see what you think.

The Library - A final post for 2011

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my local library recently. I’ve got few bad words to say about libraries… they’re a public service, and they’re full of books. I believe in the value of both of these things, and I doubt many will be surprised by my saying as much. There are, however, two types of opinion in this world. The first type is an opinion based on principles that sound morally persuasive, largely rational, and in keeping with the rest of our views. The second type is more a conviction than an opinion, you find it in your gut and think little more about its meaning thereafter, you simply believe in it. The second type is infinitely superior, it makes me think of the words of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, “A man lives by believing in something, not by arguing and debating about many things.”

Almost all of my political beliefs come from my gut. Sometimes they could use a bit of moderation, but that’s the only place from which I believe they should rightly originate. I grew-up in a town where half the young people have nothing to do but ruin their lives with drugs, they have no employment prospects, and the formal politics of this country trundles along seemingly oblivious to this inconvenient fact. This experience of growing-up underpins my politics. My position on libraries, on the other hand, I must confess has generally, until my recent visits, come more from out of my head than anywhere else. It’s only since spending regular time in a library that the conviction has made the journey south into my guts.

Each time I go there I see a man with holes in his jumper and a woollen hat sitting on top of his head. A satchel from an adult learning college rests against his chair and beside his workboots. He rolls his jaw forwards, setting eyes on dense diagrams in a book concerning the study of plumbing. Fair enough, I might be giving you a heart string tugging stereotype here, I might even be romanticising the (non) working-poor, but I don’t care, because that stereotype exists, and in him is everything that is noble in a human. You have a man in one of the poorest areas in London, seeking self-improvement so as to earn a livelihood for himself, and if you can’t esteem a man like that then who can you esteem? Rather than assisting him in his endeavour, the council see fit to close the library, limit its opening hours, or put it under the stewardship of unemployed volunteers such as himself, because of course none of us have (increasingly expensive) livings to earn, and it’s not as if anybody is paying any taxes after all.

I could give all kinds of examples for the value of libraries. I could talk about after-school clubs for children who might not have any other safe place to go to. I could give the hypothetical author who fell in love with books in a library at a young age, could give the old man who walks in and collapses from his walking stick into a chair to sit and read a newspaper. I’ll lay off the heart strings though, and stick to my man studying plumbing.

I don’t like Winston Churchill. He’s a racist, his views on Islam are embarrassing, the worst examples of a British ability to take pride in its bigotry. As a military politician he is overrated, and as a civilian politician he’s a blue-blooded aristocrat with contempt for the working man. That said, there is one anecdote-come-quotation of his that I am happy to hold in high regard. In discussing where to make savings to fund the war, Churchill was encouraged to cut the arts. His apocryphal response to this was one of outright refusal, Churchill arguing that “if we cut the arts, then what are we fighting for anyway?”

A society takes its value from its pinnacles, its most sacred entities, not from the median points and bog-standard mediocrities by which it slopes along through one more orbit of the sun. Our modern politics believes that if things are ongoing, if life continues, then all is well, like life expectancy as a measure of quality of life. In the rational, emotionless eye of modern politics, if people are still alive then things are already a success. The institutions on which our society might once have prided itself, because they were more than just the bare minimum, are no longer sustainable. Pinnacles are an excess, and society is healthy so long as you are breathing and Warner Brothers and EMI are taking-care of the pride, ambition and joy.

Let me tell you. A library is a pinnacle. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s full of knowledge, and people go there to learn. If any politician believed in economic recovery (and they don’t) rather than short-term self-preservation and lip service (which they do), then they would not even consider jeopardising the future of something so integral to education. Unless we’re envisaging UK sweatshops as a means to economic growth (and, who knows, we might be) productivity is based on education. Everything that damages education will likewise damage economic productivity. Not only that, but social cohesion also depends on education, because education is the only thing that allows people to genuinely perceive that there is more to their life than the number of decimal places that they don’t have in their bank account, the brand of trainers they don’t have on their feet, and the car they don’t have in their driveway. To put that into the context of modern Britain, education will help people perceive that there is more to their lives than the number of decimal places that they used to have in their bank account, the brand of trainers that was on their feet, and the car that they used to have in their driveway but recently had to sell.

Anyway, with all that said and done, I’ll leave you once again, hopefully with the value of libraries consolidated that bit more in your heads. In order to really see what I mean, in order to get that feeling down into your gut where it belongs, I recommend stopping-in for a visit next time you’re on the high street.

On the subject of books, my own has attracted a good amount of publishing interest lately, and I hope to be talking about the follow-up this time next year.

Festive tidings to you all... keep your wits about you.