Pseudonym

Not in my local newsagents. That old git always tried it on.

And quite right too. Just look at the DoI. It is essentially an extended parody of timeless (i.e. hopelessly outmoded) British virtues such as silliness, good humour, endless scatological chortling, and benign hobbies that contain the promise of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Nonetheless, quite a lot of the content over the years has suggested the existence of a shadowy, corrupt, narco-military think-tank somewhere in Wiltshire. As a nation, we seem to be good at blowing things up, getting high, and talking about past glories. Just ask Pink Floyd. My great-uncle worked in the aeronautical industry. My grandfather was a navigator in Lancasters. A relative in France designs Exocets, and his uncle supplies rifles to the British Army. Even my aunts drone on and on. Vice is good business. Investments in stocks should be undertaken with care, however, unless one has that particular fetish.

It took me a while to get used to it. After a while, I realised that the real American Dream is to become wealthy so that one need not worry about what things actually cost above the posted price. Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.

I was thinking of my accountant, really. I do remember a tiresome small-business owner in Maine grumbling at a town meeting that a change to a tax would mean that she wouldn't be able to calculate the tax, and someone said, "I've been in your store. You don't calculate the tax now, your till does."

Nice pun.

Indeed. And yet, those allegedly thick Americans manage to calculate all of this perfectly well, just as our grandparents could do sums in old money that would make Bill Gates's eyes glaze over with the Blue Screen of Death.

This sounds less like a justification for taxing capital than a justification for (a) not indulging ideologues unfit for office, and (b) calculating spending and taxes according to something other than the complaints of the electorate and prospects for retaining office. Those are political issues rather than economic ones. The UK lost its reputation as a credible investment destination for reasons that are scarcely connected to a surfeit of unproductive capital. That unproductive capital is more symptom than cause. I question the notion that the best way to deal with unproductive capital is to put more of it in the hands of the governments that have, in recent years, committed numerous acts of economic self-harm. If the UK wants more of its capital to be productive, the UK needs to earn back its reputation as a good place to risk capital. The Trump administration offers a window for this, I would say. It will not happen, however, unless there are better things to do with capital than spend the excess on helping the UK economy limp along for another few years without therapy or surgery. I'll happily buy shares in a European bank, or a Japanese conglomerate, but I currently have no more faith in the UK than I have in the US when it comes to economic reliability. I simply do not find that the UK has adapted to the self-inflicted loss of its reputation for reliability. Until the UK can find a political equipoise that does not foster either delusional nitwits or excessively timid political trimmers, I fear that Britons will continue to blame the money for the misuse of money. Money is not the enemy. I think there is too much unproductive capital in the UK economy as well, but the UK really needs to come up with incentives to use it productively. One need not be a tax-phobic loon to have reservations about taxing wealth in order to fuel a bunch of fantasies. Until the UK gets real about its economic relations with the rest of the world, the fantasies are all we have to guide us. Not good enough. You have a fine educational and research infrastructure. Use it. You have an opportunity to attract foreign expertise instead of deterring it with hostile-environment nonsense that flatters no-hopers and alienates people with actual talent. Take it. You have the raw material for agile, information-heavy networks of supply and demand. Build them. Let us stop pretending that the fault lies in the stars. And, please, let us stop hoping that there is great potential in people simply because they were born in Good Old Blighty, or are the salt of the earth, or went to Eton, or whatever version of British exceptionalism blinds people on any given day. There is unrealised potential, and there is hot air and promises. If the UK wants to avoid the errors of the US, there are plenty of useful lessons available. I hope the UK learns them. I would like to do something with a spare few quid other than buying Bittermints, which in any case are not made in the UK.

"Yes, M'lud, my client ran over the pedestrian whilst texting. But, as you weigh sentencing, I ask that you consider all the pedestrians he managed to avoid whilst texting."

From fires? From defective autopilots? From design flaws? Or is this statistic misleading?

I recommend paying scant attention to announcements about tariffs and much closer attention to the details of tariffs that are actually imposed. Call me old-fashioned, a fuddy-duddy, an amoral individualist if you insist; but I am generally in favour of designs that do not require passengers to read the manual in order to deploy basic safety features such as opening the door from the inside. We aren't cats, which long ago figured out how to get others to open doors for them in all circumstances.

I heartily recommend the approach that Connie Sachs summarises in Smiley's People: "Grab yourself a bit of love and wait for Armageddon."

We are all in rowing boats on the ocean. That said, I have no interest in attempting to conquer the ocean. I merely wish to evade the other idiots in their rowing boats, and avoid the inlets where they capsize and drown in large numbers. It's a bit like jazz improvisation.

Considering how often people seem surprised when the nice, quiet neighbour who keeps himself to himself turns out to have good reasons for keeping such a low profile, I am not sure that personal acquaintanceship is all that useful. At least the people who voted for Trump had some insight into his character, whereas plenty of us have learned the hard way that our parents never sent Champion to live on a farm upstate.

This brings us back to tariffs, in some ways. It was a given that increased nationalist sentiment would massively increase the potential for systems of tariffs if that sentiment led to the erosion of supranational political blocs that had their origins in trading blocs. One consequence is that sequence of formation was that the EU recognised how the development of some areas of economic activity (post-industrial and agile, for want of a shorthand) would be be at the expense of traditional, industrial, very static employment. Structural funds could help with this, but the real point was that the relationship was stipulated and "winners" were inherently required to compensate, however indirectly, for "losers". That kind of arrangement involved numerous aspects that looked utterly bewildering and foolish to the kinds of people who believed the nonsense that the tabloid press and social media propagated. It is all fun and giggles when the "us" is good, solid, common-sense decent people, and "them" is the stereotypical faceless bureaucrat (who is, somehow, never a friend or neighbour). In reality, the "us" and "them" were, of course, the same entity: the public at large. It was always the case that economic fortunes waxed and waned. A tariff regime can, in some instances, serve a useful purpose in cushioning the blows, or diluting an economic threat (such as dumping). If tariffs are understood in that fashion -- as a means, however imperfect, of redressing the balance of things that the public claims to care about -- perhaps the public will accept them. If it becomes yet another scapegoat for why people seem to struggle more to get less than they used to, I doubt anything will improve significantly. Tariffs are, in themselves, a form of scapegoat unless there are precise economic reasons why a particular product, or nation, or whatever, should be targeted. This is plainly apparent in the current US approach to using them as cudgels and carrots, but it is not written in stone that there is only one set of rules to the game. There are massive problems in all of this, but also some opportunities to rectify a few of the errors of the recent past.

Concerns? Yes. Enough to change anything significant in my life? No. That is mainly because I had already responded to the first Trump administration, and did not treat it as a glitch in the electoral system. I thought, and still think, that it was a symptom of an increasingly widespread and nihilistic repudiation of an excessively Panglossian status quo. (I think a similar instinct looked at David Cameron and saw oblivious complacency rather than calm reassurance.) I am moderately confident that the febrile political mood will not necessarily deteriorate into conflict between groups of American citizens; there are benefits to a decisive electoral victory. If anything, I think it is more likely that opposition to the administration will re-establish common ground in the public square; a return, if you will, to the moment when quite a few Oregonians who voted for Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary Clinton subsequently voted for Trump rather than Clinton. If the rationale for an administration is that only destruction of the status quo can save the day, it is particularly bad for the administration if it then fails to save the day. Voters are already getting quite fizzy on that point, and the direction of political winds is unpredictable. I am sure some progressives are crossing state lines, but that is not new. This country has a long history of episodic chilling-effect moral panics (the Red Scare, McCarthyism, Nixon's responses to countercultural protests, etc), and I think this is to be expected. As others here have pointed out, American strands of contention have very long histories. I would say they are inherent in the US and its political tradition. Rhetoric about a shared notion of what it means to be an American is one of those comforting tales that people like to rehearse, like Father Christmas and chimneys, or the spirit of the Blitz, or the unique je ne sais quoi heft of one's expensive bass. In reality, this has always been a nation of competing narratives and widespread dissent. Americans come together when someone is shooting at them, or at Thanksgiving, or when Bruce Willis makes a wisecrack. Beyond such moments, I find much to appreciate about the fact that this really is a very heterogeneous country in which cohesion is a matter of community and affinity. I have also found the overwhelming majority of people to be respectful when treated with respect, regardless of cultural assumptions and different viewpoints. On the whole, I think Trump thrives because of one thing that his supporters and detractors alike can see plainly: he represents a massive affront to a disappointing status quo. So does Bernie Sanders, for that matter, but Sanders is ultimately a dissenter within the establishment: although he is, strictly speaking, a political independent, he is also a high-profile career politician. Anything these days with a whiff of elitism or establishment bona fides has a bit of a stink to it for most people. On the other hand, Trump always manages to present himself as a privateer, a buccaneer, a pirate; and, no matter what polite society claims to think, an awful lot of people love pirates. After all, if a President Sanders went all medieval and ultra vires against energy companies, how many self-proclaimed progressives would actually object on the grounds that the rule of law is sacrosanct? And let's not pretend that US security commitments to other states are non-negotiable for progressives, because they plainly are not. The problem is that the "establishment" is simultaneously a cipher for some kind of thwarted American wellbeing, but also the bulwark that protects American wellbeing. So JP Morgan is Lex Luther until there is a banking crisis, at which point it is Superbank; scientists are a gang of oh-so-superior swots until the morgues are full (and then after they are empty again); the Pentagon is a disgraceful grift until it needs all the money in existence so that Our Brave Boys (and Girls during some election cycles) can go after whoever caught us with our pants down; the EPA is nanny nagging you to take a bath until the children in your town all seem to get sick and someone with book-learning mutters the word "cluster"; judges are corrupt until they foil the corrupt officials who you voted for because you thought they would stop corruption; and Big Business is good, bad or indifferent according to your own relationship (or, more likely, multiple relationships) with it. It is entirely possible that contemporary life has become too muddled and formless for human beings to assimilate in relation to a stable set of coordinates. Sometimes, electorates need object lessons in order to clarify what is important to them, and systems need stress tests in order to remain in place. If the system fails, perhaps it was always more illusory than it seemed; and that harsh truth is also worth knowing, whatever follows.