The World Of David Cameron & Mossack Fonseca

I have never had any investments. No shares. No ISAs. No pension plan. Partly because I've never had any disposable income I could afford to put aside. But also because I was exposed to such a world as a child by the dealings of my father and was completely repulsed by what I saw even at that tender age.

But I'm going to offer a story that in some ways best illustrates that world and which may throw some light upon the revelations of the Panama Papers albeit at a much lower level. It's a world that the average person is completely outside of and thus why revelations such as the Panama Papers seem to come as such a surprise when the story breaks. But it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise really. Just think about it, the firm Mossack & Fonseca are merely one of these type of operators across  a fistful of countries and dependencies, who host such offshore financial arrangements that so benefit their rich clients. I'd suggest it represented just the tip of the iceberg, except these countries tend to have hot weather and any ice would melt.

Okay, so on a more personal scale. My father was up in court accused of insider dealing on shares in the 1990s. The law he was prosecuted under was fairly new and was intended to prevent professionals who came by sensitive information regarding companies then made a profit from it through buying or selling shares based on the information. My father was a lawyer and had come by the information when one of his clients, an accountant, came to see him about possibly suing a company who were tarnishing his reputation as he served as a broker between it and another company who were looking to merge. The accountant had bought shares on the basis of this upcoming merger (and eventually pleaded guilty to one count while being cleared of 3 others, which was bizarre since the one he claimed guilt for was buying shares on behalf of his grand-daughter who was under 10 years old....) After the meeting in which he distributed legal advice on the slander and defamation of character, my father then proceeded to buy shares in one of the companies. And that was what he was on trial for. If the accountant hadn't have pleaded guilty to his one charge and subsequently been cleared of that as well as the other 3, then the authorities could not have come after my father, being a stage further removed from the privileged information, when they would have failed to successfully prosecute the primary source.

So I attended the court case over the 4 days it took place. My first warning should have been the moment we stepped up to the building. There was my father in his usual suit and bow tie, in the middle of defendants from the other more run of the mill cases, the Notting Hill drug dealers and gangsters. The contrast was blatant. Next thing I notice was that I'd played football regularly against one of the members of the jury which was a heck of a coincidence. I was in the public gallery so I don't know if he clocked me or knew my relationship to the accused, so it almost certainly weighed more upon my impressions than it did his. And then the trial got started.

One after the other, either for the defence or the prosecution, marched up to the witness box a parade of stockbrokers, lawyers, accountants and civil servants. Now I credit that I'm a reasonably intelligent person, well educated and reasonably well read, but I couldn't pick the bones out of what they were saying. The world of investments and stocks and shares they talked about, was as alien a landscape to me as a reality TV programme would have been to them (a slight anachronism since this was an era still relatively unsullied by the form). Again, maybe this is fanciful on my part, but I imagined I could see the eyes of the jury glaze over, because this world being presented to them just did not compute. These men and yes they were all men were arrogant and presumptive that we all knew about what they were talking about and therefore they had no need to explain and define what they did. Which was use money to make more money and to move money about. They reminded me of Catholic Priests of old jealously guarding the exclusivity of Latin that prevented any body challenging their status or knowledge. The accountants and stockbrokers were made to squirm by the QCs, because bandying words was not really their thing. The lawyers in the box were better suited to the fencing. All were odious to my judgemental eye.

Having sat through that trial, I was none the wiser whether my father was guilty under the law or not (as per usual any legislation drafted by Parliament you can normally drive a bus through its loopholes or lack of definition. Information is a precious commodity in the world of speculators and investors, a bit like getting the scoop on how a horse is training from the stables ahead of a big race. But it remains inestimably hard to decide what and who is 'privileged' in regard to information. I think my father was certainly morally culpable if not technically guilty, a bit like David Cameron. Anyway he was found guilty and as a final disorienting landmark, the fine was paltry compared to the fees of my father's legal team which was what actually bankrupted him. Money chasing after money again, yet not quite at the same level of no win no fee have you injured yourself at work the rest of us get bombarded with on TV...


So the world of investment remains abstruse to many of us. Hence when the shock horror, rich people salt their gotten gains away from the taxman revelation emerges, it really shouldn't be a surprise at all, but inevitably is.  I loathe those for whom money is the only interest they have, not just professionally but in their whole mien, so that  though they would proudly pledge themselves to the UK, at the same time getting their money safe from the talons of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, no matter how legally they are behaving. In the same manner as the moment the government mentions a crackdown on corporate tax avoidance, some firms start making noises they'll quit the UK for more tolerant tax regimes. These people have no deep stake in our country. Like the offshore operators they utilise, have money will travel to find the best deal. It behooves us all to try and educate ourselves, to arm ourselves with the information to be able to nail these sharp practitioners who screw the country out of valuable funds. This is why Cameron can bare faced stand up and proclaim he has done nothing illegal, which is true, but it gives the lie to his political message of one nation Conservatism, we're all in this together, the cuts to the welfare budget are all that stand between the UK and economic bankruptcy, etc etc. As my father's case  demonstrated, there is the letter of the law and then there is its spirit.

Justice is blindfolded rather than blind... Coincidently, when I did jury service, one of my cases was about the receipt of stolen weighing scales...

Think Drunk Tanks

So the Conservative Government claim they to go to war on binge drinking. Partly as a measure of economics, to save the NHS the costs of sewing up people injured while insensible, the Police for dealing with the drunken violence and vandalism and generally to reclaim the centres of cities and towns up and down the land for 'decent' citizens. Binge drinking they say, is a symptom of the country's moral decay, another indicator of "Broken Britain". As analyses go, it's probably not too wide of the mark. But where do they think it stems from? This moral decay and Broken Britain. One doesn't have to go too far back into recent history to trace its genesis. And oh yes, it almost certainly arose during the last time the Conservatives held power, though ensuing Labour Governments did nothing to halt its inexorable tide.

After the post-war austerity of the 50s, there rose a new economic class with purchasing power, that of the young. Music and fashion, though overseen by Svengalis, was largely generated from the grass roots, as this new class flexed its creative and purchasing muscle.

In the 1980s, again a new class was empowered through their earning capacity, as Conservative economic policy targeted bringing the upper strata of the working class into a home and share- owning Shangri La. This was not grass roots generated in terms of what the money was spent on. Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" character, a get-rich plasterer satirised the times with laser precision: all spending power and no idea what to buy. Apocryphal tales of banners being unfurled at the opera bearing the legend "Bring On The Fat Bird", city floor traders necking champagne in bars as if it was lager, with spritzers for the ladies and the rise of the brand and the label as some sort of proof of material Election.

The 80s heralded the consumptive age. When aspirations were met through material purchases and pleasure was measured in terms of quantitive units. Yet for one not insignificant part of the country the 80s were as blighted as their communities, with job losses and a benefits dependency culture. Yet the aggressive acquisition culture was still being broadcast to them as worth striving for (and perhaps reached its apotheosis with the riots of last Summer). Between both the culture of excess and the culture of deprivation, the British ceded the arts of pleasure. That is we could no longer rely on our own creative energies to summon up a good night out. Not one that wasn't soused in drink anyway. Alcohol somehow was supposed to provide all the entertainment one could wish for. It was the genie that granted wishes, or at least unlocked the inhibitions to such wish fulfillment.

The Labour government that followed did nothing to reverse the trend, continuing to neglect those in need and doing nothing to tamp down the excesses of those with money. If anything they made it worse through loosening the legislation on alcohol, by permitting alcopop drinks to be sold to under 18s and allowing 24 hour licensing of premises. Teenagers who had experienced cheap, accessible foreign holidays, brought back their copious drinking habits to Britain with them and helped turn our city centres into no-go areas at the weekends. Girls as well as boys now embraced the abuse of alcohol too.

I wrote about all these trends in my debut novel "A,B&E". Part of the novel is narrated by a nurse in Casualty, stitching up all the pugilists to return to their drink-fuelled fights. The other is narrated by a woman abroad, watching the staggering amounts drunk by British youth on holiday, with the inevitable consequences. I started that novel over 12 years ago. There is nothing new that Prime Minister Cameron is talking about, though as usual the politicians look at the conspicuous symptoms and a quick, superficial sticking plaster, rather than the deep underlying causes. I would and did go so far to say that we are an unhappy and unfulfilled nation. We don't know what makes us happy, or possibly even more worrying, we don't know what happiness is. And with the current economic stringencies, we have just got a whole lot more unhappy as we feel the pinch so we can't even buy the white goods in such prodigious quantities as we used to.

Cameron, or someone in his cabinet, ought to read my book. Of course they won't. But his lightbulb moment of 'we have a problem here with binge culture' is something that artists, writers and cultural commentators have been expounding upon for many years, only to fall on deaf ears.

"Alcohol, the paint stripper of civilisation’s veneer. Bottled up rage, uncorked and decanted"

"The trouble with A&E is that it’s full of insensible people. Those off their trolleys and straight on to ours. Out of their minds with alcohol or drugs. Or a Carefree in the Community policy. Simultaneously anaesthetised and adrenalised, oblivious to the pain signals radiating from within their bodies"

Clueless Politicians And Plodding Police

So the mother of all parliaments was recalled from its summer holidays to debate the riots. Today was the day for answers and leadership right?

Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated his assertion that "the fightback has begun".

Which begs the question as to why we need to be 'fighting back' in the first place?

For whatever reason the police largely stood by in a vain attempt to contain what was fast moving and highly mobile rioting. They ceded the shopping high streets to the rioters. So the police now need to reassert their authority and control.

For the first time in my life, I actually feel sorry for the police. They've always been detested by the demographic of law-breaking people who were rioting. But now they've aroused the ire of the law-abiding citizens who felt unprotected and the retailers who saw them standing uselessly by while their property was looted or torched. They're getting it in the neck from all sides.

My criticism of the police would centre on their complete failure to deal with the burgeoning gang culture that has taken hold of certain communities and their high streets.

We have imported the American model of gang culture, virtually lock stock and barrel, albeit with our more stringent gun laws, the knife is more prevalent than the gun, although depressingly that balance looks like it is shifting too. We have gang boundaries and loyalties determined by territory, graffiti marking those boundaries like a dog spoors lamp-posts. They have even adopted the bandana as part of their affiliations. What self-respecting Englishman would wear such an item, apart from a brief flowering during the 80's New Romanticism? Now it is de rigueur for signalling your colours.

The Americans have 30 years experience ahead of us. On how gangs act, the collective mentality, the petty and violent crime they indulge in, the relationship to drug dealing, the symbols and mores of them. I question whether our police have ever seriously sought to consult such expertise and actually get ahead of the game. I don't blame them for failing to be ahead of the game with the social media driving the fluidity of the riots. But their inability to interdict the gang structure and operations is an unforgivable major failing. They have been blighting our communities and streets for over a decade now and their ability to act with virtual impunity from the law has culminated in what we have seen this week. They attacked the shopping areas they know so well from prowling and predating them week after week after week. They knew which shops they wanted to hit, what goods they wanted to have. They'd done their window shopping previously and took advantage of the opportunity to now just take them.

But returning to Cameron's new catchphrase. That notion of 'fight back' also implies the need to hit back at an aggressor. Are we admitting that we are in fact engaged on a low level war?

Mrs Thatcher declared that there were elements of society antipathetic to it, who she dubbed "the enemy within". But her targets were specifically political opponents, both institutional and grass roots, but again this notion of an enemy as in a war.

The maxim of any military tactician is "Know thine enemy" yet not one single government has made any attempt to understand the mentality of those involved in the riots, for to do so would involve admitting to their own culpability in helping to foster them.

The accusation hurled against the US involvement in Vietnam, while some of its own cities burned and police were turning guns on demonstrating students and protesting prisoners, was how could the country prosecute wars abroad without recognising the ongoing war it had back home in its ghettoes? And now the fine upstanding governments of those well-know democracies of Iran, China and Libya are gleefully telling us to get our own house in order rather than sending our bombers over the countries of others and appealing to the United Nations top intervene to uphold the democratic right to protest.

If we can declare war on an abstract word such as 'terror', surely we can do the same with an abstract word but material reality, in 'deprivation'?

Of course the riots were not solely motivated by deprivation (see my earlier post). Just so you don't credit that I'm only bashing the political right, the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party Ed Milliband today asked "How do we have people among us who think it's OK to go and harm and despoil their communities in this way?" Because Mr socially-concerned, oh so unaware Milliband, the rioters don't feel any allegiance to call themselves a member of any community. They are without any stake in society whatsoever. The only things they take from their community are money and goods with menaces and a postcode by which to name their gangs.

Utterly clueless the lot of them. We get the politicians we deserve and the politicians get the citizens they deserve back.