Oil, what oil?

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.
They danced by the light of the moon
- Edward Lear

Last week's White House presser had the chief energy adviser saying the "vast majority of the oil has either been cleaned, skimmed or contained." Not quite the catastrophe the administration had wanted to hang around the necks of "British Petroleum" aka BP. More an alignment with sentiments expressed by Tony Haywood.

Easing off the accelerator

This could be the week of sticky pedals as Toyota and the Bank of England face the truth about what happens when you take your foot off the gas. Has the UK economy reached its cruising speed? And it is now all down hill to an economic recovery?

The question now in everyone's minds is how safe is it to ease off, is the timing right and what happens if it starts to unravel? Will the economy continue to accelerate or will the brakes cut in?

No Grit for the Oyster

No war plan ever survived the first hour of battle, according to Clausewitz. So where was he when you needed him?

The current situation serves to demonstrate how weak our politicians are at handling complex and overlapping issues. To which can now be added problems with forecasting.

Not down to us says the Met Office. All UK contingency planning is based on our five-day forecasts, “which are massively reliable.” Just so. And after that? With increasing regulatory demands ... careful about clearing your own pathway ... and political interference in energy supply, UK systems appear to be suffering from short term vision and a failure to achieve long term infrastructure improvement.

Dancing around the issues

With TV programmers looking to fill the entertainment slot left by Britain’s Got Talent, Prime Minister's Question Time from the Commons may provide the solution. As choreography goes it was a fine display yesterday with ministers manoeuvring around Gordon Brown. A variation of Strictly Come Dancing with partners voting themselves off the dance floor.

If only they moved as quickly to solve the crises they have created. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To lose one cabinet minister is unfortunate; to lose two.....”

Right said (Sir) Fred - it's a hole new crisis

Those readers old enough to remember Bernard Cribbens and his song about men trying to dig a hole and then giving up. might pause to reflect on how it all ended. After many attempts to dig said hole, the lads abandoned it. In the lyrics the line was: Right said Fred, let's have another cuppa tea and then go home. Or in Gordon’s case, lets go to the White House.

The hole gets deeper; Lord Myners says he knew something but not everything about the pension deal. Yet Harriet Harman says the government will seek legal action to stop Sir Fred getting the full whack. Something m' learned friends think might be hard to deliver. But that doesn’t matter because apparently the case is not scheduled for Court Number One at the Old Bailey but at the court of public opinion. Presumably it’s the one across the road in the pub.

Storm in a coffee cup

It is a sign of the times that nearly eighty years ago, as depression swept the western world, the British Empire or what remained of it sat down, brewed a nice cup of tea then tried to figure what went wrong.

Today as the greatest minds in Europe plus our own Prime Minister prepare for the April G20 summit, the true state of the British economy is brought home, not by an infusion of leaves from Ceylon, but by that standard bearer of globalisation, Starbucks.

NIMBY ... or not in my back yard until “buddy can you spare a loan?” – all currencies accepted

For those with a long memory, you might recall that globalisation was touted as a sort of business panacea; embrace this concept and all will be well with international trade. A keen supporter, surprisingly, turned out to be Bin Laden himself (or perhaps one of the 20 plus people the CIA believe might be him.) He appeared in a video wearing a Taiwanese watch; carrying a Chinese Kalashnikov; speaking into a Japanese camera; and transmitted via a US satellite uplink, espousing his particular version of the Internationale.

Ah, things were so simple then. Now, it is not a good time to be a foreigner in a globalised, UK, world. Workers at nuclear power plants in Sellafield, and Heysham joined oil refinery workers at Lindsey to protest at the employment of non UK nationals, leading Lord Mandelson to proclaim that the strikers were pursuing the “politics of xenophobia”.