That volcano!

It bothered me not knowing how to pronounce Eyjafjallajoekull, so I wanted to buy a teach-yourself Icelandic book. Amazon offered three, so I began to read the reviews. The general agreement was that Glendening's primer was terribly difficult because it expected you to understand grammatical terms like 'nominative' and 'subjunctive'. I suddenly realized how handicapped - sorry, lingusitically challenged - the younger generation of Britons must be. Actually, I already knew it; I even have to teach undergraduates what a paragraph is. Fifty years ago we were taught the grammar of our own language.

That reminds me of my shock in reading a statement of Prime Minister Bliar, who clearly didn't know the difference between 'may' and 'might'. That becomes important when it comes to knowing that 'Saddam Hussein may have weapons of mass destruction' is not the same as 'he might have them'. Clarity of thought, as George Orwell always insisted, cannot be divorced from clarity of language.

There is a lot to be said for the use of a 'dead' language for international relations. As long as people used Latin, everybody knew that it required effort to write it clearly. Now that sloppy English is considered good enough, disastrous misunderstandings can arise, as for example in the argument over whether Israel is required to withdraw 'from occupied territories' or 'from the occupied territories'.

The hollow dollar

At the moment both the pound and the euro are low against the dollar, and the feeling is that they will go down still further. But the dollar itself looks very shaky, with trillions of dollars of public and private debt, so how can it be seen as a refuge? What makes it different is that it is still the international currency. China and the Gulf states and the other holders of dollars don't dare sell them as that would bring down the price of their remaining dollars.

The only way out of this global mess is the creation of a true world currency governed by an international body answerable to an assembly with fair representation of the nations, based not on their wealth but on the size of their populations. Keynes proposed something like this in 1944 but the American government blocked him, preferring a dollar hegemony that would guarantee them economic domination.

While waiting for an international currency and if you can't stand the stress of speculation, for your personal needs I believe it is best buy durable and portable things of lasting value, with the lowest possible transaction costs. Unless you plan to live in one, a house is a bad placement as prices go up and down and the transaction costs are high. Antique jewellery is probably the best bet (but insure it properly!); it has already proved its worth by lasting. It is an ancient answer, but there is no new thing under the sun.

Same old

So they are back, the public schoolboys, plus some public schoolgirls, resuming their right to rule, with help from what was our only radical opposition party. They've promised a referendum on voting reform, but they'll do their damnedest to make sure of a No. What's the betting that the next election will be on a first-past-the-post basis, that the LibDems will be wiped out and that we're in for another 18 years of Tory rule?

In my local constituency there may have been something particularly unpleasant. A friend writes "I wonder if you received any 'church interest' leaflets opposing Evan's religious and ethics opinions? I had heard that the Tories were conducting a rather backhand and nasty campaign with local church organizations highlighting his opinions about abortion etc... but this was only rumour..."

Unfortunately I put all the Tory leaflets in the bin, but it seems plausible in view of the opinion piece in the Telegraph by their religious affairs correspondent, hailing the defeat of Evan Harris as "the best result of the election" and calling him "Dr Death". I note also that the new MP says she is a "lifelong Christian" and spent her gap year on an unspecified mission in the Middle East. Has the Christian Right made it into Parliament? One more step in our Americanization?!

Short memories

Has everyone forgotten that Lord Jenkins, at Blair's request, chaired a commission on electoral reform and that it reported in September 1998 recommending the AV+ system of voting? Why should the LibDem negotiators now allow Cameron to talk about a future commission when we have already had one that gave a clear recommendation? LibDems should not even contemplate coalition with the Tories without a firm commitment to an early referendum on this proposal. Coalition with Labour is the lesser evil.

Jenkins was one of the biggest political figures of his time, remembered especially as the last great reforming Home Secretary. He abolished the death penalty and birching, decriminalized homosexuality, legalized abortion and ended theatre censorship. He was later an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer. After twice failing to be elected Leader of the Labour Party he became President of the European Commission. In 1981 he was one of the founders of the Social Democrat Party, which later merged with the Liberals to form the "LibDems". He accepted a peerage and was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

Yet here we are only twelve years after his commission's report and only seven years after his death, and everyone appears to have forgotten. Strange, because people still seem to remember the miseries of the 1980s; otherwise how can we explain the fact that two thirds of us voted not to have a Tory government?

Republican Britons

In all the calculations about possible coalitions, everybody seems to think it normal that the Sinn Fein candidates elected on Thursday will not be able to take their seats in Parliament. Little has changed in sixty years. I remember listening to the election results in 1951, when I was twelve, and asking my father why it was that in Northern Ireland, over and over again, we heard that the Sinn Fein candidate had the most votes but the Unionist was elected.

Well now at least we allow the Sinn Fein candidate to be elected, but he or she cannot come to Westminster. And why is that? Because M.P.s have to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, which of course a republican cannot do. There was a time when the oath had to be sworn on the Bible, which ruled out anyone who was not Christian of Jewish. We changed that, and it would surely be equally easy to change the terms of the oath of allegiance.

This is why we have no Republican Party in Great Britain. Those of us who would prefer to elect a president cannot have our views represented. We cannot even test how many people would vote for such a change. It is one more reason why it is very difficult to call the country a proper democracy.

Hung Parliament

So there we are: we got the hung parliament that we deserve, and now the children are scrapping over who gets to do what. It sounds ominously as if Nick Clegg is going to do a deal with the Tories, which would be iniquitous, since 63% of us voted not to have a Tory government. But then a deal with Labour might be even more unpopular.

Perhaps we should just let the Tories form a minority government. After the ghastly economic events of the next year, whatever party rules will be deeply unpopular, so why not just give them enough rope to hang themselves, and meanwhile renew the Labour Party and rid it of the Mandelson-Blair-Brown heritage?

How pleasant to escape from the turmoil in the human anthill into the little world of actual ants! I have just read E O Wilson's new novel, Anthill, in which 70 pages are devoted to the rise and fall of ant empires. The whole book is a good read, strongly recommended.

Aircraft carrier

It is the stuff of comedy. Suddenly taking his mind off the election, Gordon Brown discovers that hundreds of thousands of British air travellers - voters! - are stranded around the world. He goes for the dramatic gesture: send a battleship to pick up soldiers stuck in Spain, (together with a hundred or so civilians)! Why didn't he send an aircraft carrier? There would have been standing room for thousands. Oh yes, and there were 100 fantasy coaches on their way to Madrid.

Then British Airways announces that 20-odd jumbos are converging on Britain and all of a sudden 'new scientific evidence' emerges that it will be safe for them to land. For the two weeks remaining until the election there will be an awful lot of egg scraped off faces. Looking at the maps of the cloud curling round the anticyclone, and hearing that the dust was mostly in a thin layer, I thought it evident all along that there must be safe passages in.

Equally volcanic has been the explosion of popular support for the Lib Dems. People have suddenly realized that they don't have to vote Tory to keep out 'New' Labour, nor Labour to keep out the Tory toffs. There is a major party that wants more progressive taxation, firm control of the banks, voting reform, the scrapping of the Trident replacement programme and much else that is genuinely different. This should have happened in 2005, but this time the Lib Dems have a leader who is not on the bottle.