I meant to post this ages ago, but it got lost in the furore over Murdoch and the ‘riots’. It’s an extract from the statement that the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny, made to Parliament following the publication of the official report into child abuse (and the covering up of same) in the Diocese of Cloyne. The Irish Times published the statement in its issue of July 21, and it’s worth reading in full. The extract that first caught my eye runs like this:

THE REVELATIONS of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order.

Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic – as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

And in doing so, the Cloyne report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism – the narcissism – that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or “managed” to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and “reputation”.

Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”, the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

The radicalism, humility and compassion which are the very essence of its foundation and purpose. The behaviour being a case of Roma locuta est: causa finita est.

Except in this instance, nothing could be further from the truth…

As someone who fled my clerically-oppressed homeland many moons ago, I never thought I’d live to hear an Irish politician speak so plainly. And to be honest, I didn’t think that Enda Kenny had it in him. I was wrong.

The key issue is whether the Catholic church accepts the principle that its agents and employees have to obey the laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate. One of the most shameful aspects of the country in which I was brought up is that the Vatican was allowed by the State to run its own version of Sharia Law.

As a result of the statement, the Papal Nuncio (Ambassador of the Vatican) has been recalled to Rome. We await with interest the Vatican’s response. In the meantime one useful interim step the Irish government could take would be to remove all Catholic church involvement in Irish schools.

Ever since he hired Andy Coulson we’ve known that Cameron’s judgement is seriously flawed. Events last week confirmed that, as this excellent New Statesman piece by Medhi Hasan points out.

What, I wonder, was the defining image of the past week? A terrified woman jumping out of a burning building? A 140-year-old furniture shop in Croydon that managed to survive the Blitz, engulfed in flames? An injured, bleeding teenager having his rucksack emptied by a passing group of feral youths?

Or was it, perhaps, a tanned and smiling David Cameron, arm around an Italian waitress, Francesca Ariani, at the Dolcenero café in Montevarchi? Our holidaying PM, who had earlier provoked headlines by failing to leave Ariani a tip, had gone back to the Tuscan café to make amends, with photographers in tow.

Purely in PR terms, it was a bizarre decision by the man who was once head of corporate communications for Carlton Television. Back home, as violence and looting erupted in Britain's cities, the photograph, published in newspapers on 7 August, served to remind the public that their Prime Minister was abroad, on a £6,000-a-week holiday, with no plans to come back and take charge.

As late as 6.30pm on the evening of Monday 8, a full 48 hours into the riots, Downing Street was adamant that there was no need for the Prime Minister to return home early from Italy…

Note the PR-flackery of the return to the cafe “to make amends” with photographer in tow. New Labour couldn’t have done it any better.

Two very good pieces today bringing some semblance of sanity to balance the superheated indignation of the ruling elite.

First, Peter Oborne in the Telegraph who, like me, was struck by the hypocrisy implicit in the shock and outrage expressed in Parliament, in which MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them. “I cannot accept that this is the case”, he writes.

Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington.

Right on. Oborne goes on to recount a dinner party he went to in Kensington some time ago.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.

Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable?

And as for the MPs. The idea of some of these moral cretins taking the ethical high road is simply staggering. There was Denis MacShane, for example, MP for Rotherham, explaining that “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” Could this MacShane possibly be related to the MP who claimed (perfectly legally, I am sure) £5,900 for eight laptops?

And then there was the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asking the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Is he by any chance related to the Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television?

Mr Oborne is as nauseated as I am by the spectacle of Cameron taking the moral high ground. He talked a lot about morality, but only as something that applies to the poor. He would, he said, “restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” It never occurred to him that morality begins at home — in Downing Street. “The tragic truth”, Oborne writes, “is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test”.

It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.

There was a time — round the time when his young son died and he was running for office — when Cameron seemed to have the makings of a rounded human being. But it turns out to have been an illusion. What’s happened is that the shallow, oily, polished PR-flack that he used to be has reappeared. And he’s running a corrupt, morally-compromised, untruthful administration that is more divisive than anything we’ve seen since Thatcher at her peak.

The other note of sanity today was struck by my lawyer friend, Conor Gearty, writing in the London Review of Books. He casts a sceptical eye over Cameron’s newly-discovered taste for repressive legislation. “The police do not need any new legal powers to deal with the kind of disorder that has been seen this week in English cities”, he writes.

The Thatcher government’s 1986 Public Order Act put the crimes of riot and violent disorder on a statutory basis, with those convicted being liable to terms of imprisonment of up to ten and five years respectively. Despite the prime minister’s snide remark in the Commons yesterday, there are no human rights concerns, ‘phoney’ or otherwise, that prevent pictures of suspects being circulated if that’s the most effective way of bringing them to justice.

The stop and search powers that came into force in 1986 have already been greatly expanded by legislation in 1994 and 2000 and are already arguably too broad rather than too narrow: police harassment of young men from certain ethnic groups has clearly already been a cause of huge resentment.

Though the old Riot Act of 1714 has been repealed, the law allows the police (and for that matter the rest of us) to use reasonable force to suppress an ongoing riot. This elastic provision would allow, in extremis, the deployment of troops and the shooting of civilian rioters (and others) that might well ensue. The police already use firearms and – another legacy from the Thatcher era – have the legal right to possess (and therefore to use) water cannon, baton rounds (plastic bullets) and CS gas if such equipment is ‘reasonably required… to discharge their functions’. Likewise, whether you want to call it a curfew or not, the common law has long allowed control of the movement of people if it is judged necessary to curb or prevent breaches of the peace.

The issue is not one of legality; it is of capacity. This is what makes the plan to make deep cuts to police forces across the country so politically risky.

Yep. It’s such an obvious point that even Boris ‘Bullingdon’ Johnson gets it.

This is a snapshot of a graphic on from Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He reports that Blair Scott, a spokesman for the American Atheists, Inc., was subjected to over 8,000 death threats and other violent rhetoric after appearing on Fox News. The illustration shows some sample responses. Apart from shedding light on some of the attitudes of the US religious fundamentalism, it also rather undermines my theory that forcing people to use real names in Internet discourse increases the likelihood of temperate, reasonable online behaviour.

Thoughtful piece by Laurie Penny in openDemocracy.net.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything: “Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

This is a very good piece.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night.

The London/Manchester/Nottingham/etc. riots (and the wrangling over the US Debt Ceiling) are just the latest demonstrations of an ugly truth — that our so-called liberal democracies have been hollowed out. We saw that three years ago with the bail-out of the banks. Jonathan Freedland has a good column about this in the Guardian.

This scepticism toward the potency of democratic politicians – and therefore democratic politics itself – is oddly echoed by the looters themselves. Certainly no one outside the Iranian state media is calling them "protesters", but even "rioters" seems the wrong word, carrying with it a hint of political purpose. For some, especially at the start in Tottenham, there was clearly a political dimension – with the police the prime focus of their anger. But many of the copycat actions across London and elsewhere have no apparent drive beyond the opportunistic desire to steal and get away with it. It's striking that the targets have not been town halls or, say, Tory HQ – stormed by students last November – but branches of Dixons, Boots and Carphone Warehouse. If they are making a political statement, it is that politics does not matter.

And while the revulsion at the looting has been widespread and bipartisan – with plenty of liberals admitting to "coming over all Daily Mail" at the ugliness of the vandalism – that sense of the impotence of politics is widespread, too. One aspect of the phone-hacking scandal that went deep was its revelation that those we might think exert authority – police and politicians – were in fact supine before an unelected media corporation. The sheer power of News Corp contrasted with the craven behaviour of those we elect or entrust to look out for us…

It’s interesting (and drearily predictable) to see the media and the government co-operating to formulate a narrative (“mindless violence, thuggery, etc.) as the sole explanation for what’s going on in London right now. But we’ve known forever that explosions like this stem from deeper causes — as Nina Power points out in this excellent Guardian comment piece. The levels of social and economic inequality in Britain and the US have become so obscene that the only viable strategy for the established order is to try to focus attention somewhere else.

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

Sobering Telegraph piece by Peter Oborne.

There have been warnings that we may be in for a repeat of the calamitous events of 2008. The truth, however, is that the situation is potentially much bleaker even than in those desperate days after the closure of Lehman Brothers. Back then, policy-makers had at their disposal a whole range of powerful tools to remedy the situation which are simply not available today.

First of all, the 2008 crisis struck at the ideal stage of an economic cycle. Interest rates were comparatively high, both in Europe and the United States. This meant that central banks were in a position to avert disaster by slashing the cost of borrowing. Today, rates are still at rock bottom, so that option is no longer available.

Second, the global situation was far more advantageous three years ago. One key reason why Western economies appeared to recover so fast was that China responded with a substantial economic boost. Today, China, plagued by high inflation as a result of this timely intervention, is in no position to stretch out a helping hand.

But it is the final difference that is the most alarming. Back in 2008, national balance sheets were in reasonable shape. In Britain, for example, state debt (according to the official figures, which were, admittedly, highly suspect) stood at around 40 per cent of GDP. This meant that we had the balance sheet strength to step into the markets and bail out failed banks. Partly as a result, national debt has now surged past the 60 per cent mark, meaning that it is impossible for the British government to perform the same rescue operation without risking bankruptcy. Many other Western democracies face the same problem.

The consequence is terrifying. Policy-makers find themselves in the position of a driver heading down the outside lane of a motorway who suddenly finds that none of his controls are working: no accelerator, no brakes and a faulty steering wheel. Experience, skill and a prodigious amount of luck are required if a grave accident is to be averted. Unfortunately, it is painfully apparent that none of these qualities are available: Western leaders are out of their depth.

Oborne thinks that banks in Spain and Italy may close — in the near future. So holidaymakers ought to be prepared.

British holidaymakers on the Continent should be advised to take care: hold only the minimum of the local currency, and treat with especial suspicion euro notes coded Y, S and M (signifying they were printed in Greece, Italy and Portugal respectively). Take plenty of dollars with you, which shopkeepers will certainly accept if there is a run on the banks, or if euros suddenly cease to be legal currency. The precautions may not prove necessary, but there is no point in taking risks.

Alarmist? Maybe. Maybe not.

Great post by Paul Krugman.

Amid all the debt hysteria, it’s worth taking a look at the actual arithmetic here — because what this arithmetic says is that the size of the deficit in the next year or two hardly matters for the US fiscal position — and in fact the size over the next decade is barely significant.

Start with interest rates. What matters for debt sustainability is the real interest rate, since what matters is keeping real debt, not nominal debt, from growing. (World War II debt never got paid off, it just eroded in real terms to the point where it was trivial). As of yesterday, the US government could lock in 30-year bonds at a real interest rate of 1.25%. That means that a trillion dollars in extra debt would mean $12.5 billion a year in additional real interest payments.

Meanwhile, the CBO estimates potential real GDP in 2021 at about $18 trillion in 2005 dollars, or around $19 trillion in 2011 dollars.

Put these together, and they say that an extra trillion in borrowing adds something like 0.07% of GDP in future debt service costs. Yes, that zero belongs there. The $4 trillion S&P said it needed to see clocks in at less than 0.3% of GDP.

These are not, to say the least, make or break numbers.

Yep. But what’s going on the US Congress has nothing to do with reality. or rationality, come to that.