50 years ago today, the first man in space, now commemorated with a plastic table lamp. The House of Thus also has some Gagarin pencils and keyrings, but we're not selling any of them because we like Yuri and always have. He was one of us.

50 years to the day after orbiting the earth for 89 minutes in a tiny capsule jettisoned from the mighty Vostok 2 rocket, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was awarded another gong. A plastic table lamp constructed in his honour has been inducted into ThusMagazine’s Quality Hall of Fame. The event, widely leaked on the Brick Lane Robot Shop’s secretive Facebook page, has thus far attracted no comment from Russian officials, nor has it featured on BBC Radio, seemingly obsessed with Gagarin chitter chatter on this momentous day. The award judges, long time Gagarin admirers, as opposed to Yuri-come-lately bandwagoners, have stated that both the timing and the bestowing of this honour are entirely coincidental.

Yuri Gagarin table lamp - another quality object from the House of Thus. Note the Vostok 1 scale model at its apex.

The Yuri Gagarin plastic table lamp has been chosen for its unique aesthetics, its ingenious use of a 240 volt AC/DC currency transformer to power a tiny flashlight bulb and the incomprehensible but mystical symbols surrounding its base. The lamp, imported by the Brick Lane Robot Shop from a source in the Ukraine, possibly survived Chernobyl and certainly survived Parcelforce, the brutal UK shipping company which subjected it to six weeks in orbit around various depots. The lamp, which glows in an unusual combination of red and green, often buzzes when left on for more than a few minutes, suggesting preparation for lift off. In short, the Gagarin lamp fulfills most if not all of the Thus Quality Hall of Fame criteria: it is what it is because it is Thus.

I first became interested in Yuri Gagarin as a young man when a Leeds traffic cop pulled me up for allegedly speeding on my motorbike, with the words: ‘Who the fxxx do you think you are? Yuri Gagarin?’ Wearing a helmet and sharing the same physical appearance as Yuri – short, stocky, clearly highly intelligent but wearing the tragic demeanour of somehow missing out on life after displaying early promise – I could see how the policeman might have been mistaken.

I have always empathised with the first man to see the earth from space but was never given another chance to check out the details he no doubt missed on the first, all-too-brief  recce. Some say it was because he put on too much weight on his constant round of victory tour banquets and couldn’t fit in the capsule a second time round. Others say the risk of his dying in space on a second trip was simply too great for a Soviet Deputy of immense public stature and PR value. I tend to believe the latter.

Yuri visited Manchester three months after his triumphant flight – and, like me, survived the experience. He came from a poor background in Siberia, was a modest family man to the end who liked his pint and was a great fan of tinny space hardware. Apart from Siberia, we are also alike in these respects. The enduring popularity of Yuri Gagarin, apart from his brilliant name, is that he was a man of the people: everyman and superman. His achievement lit the blue touch paper under the space race, which gave us non stick pans, pens which wrote upside down and Bowie’s Space Oddity, amongst other priceless cultural adjuncts. (Incidentally, while NASA spent millions developing upside down space biros, the Soviets simply used pencils).

Yuri Gagarin hologram keyring, another life-enhancing gem you missed because you were too lazy to visit the Brick Lane Robot Shop

In celebrating Yuri’s life and achievements, we should not forget that the youth of today take space and its oddities for granted. I recently gave away a priceless holographic Yuri Gagarin keyring to my robot shop neighbour, brilliant wedding photographer Nick White, in exchange for a hideous 1960s side table used for the Robot Shop Day of the Dead skeleton Christmas Tree pageant. ‘It’s great, mate, but who the xxxx is Yuri Gagarin?”He’s the inspiration behind the Yuri Gagarin Chernobyl table lamp. That’s who. Without him, there’d be no satellite TV,’ I replied, with a heavy heart. Nastrovye, you crazy diamond.

John J Kelly

I stayed in this roundy cottage in Portmerion and was given a whole lot of stuff to think about

Back from the Clough Ellis vision of Italianate Arcadia, setting for the surreal 1970s spy series, ‘The Prisoner,’ I struggled to synthesise what I heard, present it as a General Theory of Universal Knowledge, flog it to a New Age business publisher, save the planet, buy myself a converted trawler with a bikini bird crew and bother Japanese whalers (with the bikini bird crew pole dancing round the mizzen mast).

Frankly, I was plaiting sawdust until this morning, stuck at the general theory of universal knowledge bit, and not for the first time. The whole save the planet/get some cash/buy a trawler/bother the whalers with pole dancing sirens scheme looked as dead in the water as my chances of becoming foreign policy advisor after telling Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, another Portmerion guest, that the UN resembled a second rate, more corrupt, version of FIFA. Then I awoke to the epiphany that we are names, not numbers. Every life form on the planet  has a unique individual identity, dignity and purpose. Nature indiscriminately abhors entropy. Humans, the last, lunkheaded twirl of the evolutionary dice, persist in the deadly fallacy that they are above, not a part of, creation. Their high-handed, cack-handed interventions, based on mathematically impossible attempts to exclude uncertainty and randomness from the infinite possibilities afforded by an ever-expanding series of variable circumstances will, by nature, always generate unforeseen, counter-intuitive consequences. The more binary data we collect, the greater the hubristic illusion of control in a quantum universe. We are the deadly meddlers, psychopathic intellectual delinquents with yottabytes of information but no understanding of the tendency of exosystems to deliquesce. Or something along those lines.

Just then another thought hit, me like a great wave biffing a Japanese nuclear plant: ‘Jesus, it’s 8-30 already. I need to walk the whippet. I’ll park this stuff until I’ve seen what the others have written and knock something off tomorrow after I’ve bought a few robots and done Waitrose.’

Firing up my ecologically incorrect 1972 Beetle convertible, partly compensated by its unique interior rainforest microclimate of continual damp and lichens, I was soon yomping round Hampstead Heath, London’s last great wilderness, with no sighting of any other native species apart from George Michael and packs of exotic dogs and their walkers, dressed for the mild weather in North Face Arctic survival parkas. Coffee beaker in one hand, dogpoo bag in the other – careful which one you lift to your lips – I relegated the Mission to Explain to an internal rant about Arsenal’s inability to grasp the essential notion that the purpose of football was not to create the perfect balance sheet but to win the occasional trophy. I was considering whether a latter day Christopher Marlowe would have substituted the tale of Arsene Wenger’s Icarean 49 match unbeaten run followed by six years of no silverware for Tamburlaine the Great when I thought I saw a huge white airbag, bouncing at great speed across the manicured blasted wasteland. As everyone who wasted time in front of the TV in the 1970s instead of revising knows, whenever he tried to escape Portmerion, the Prisoner was engulfed then herded back by a giant chewing gum bubble. The genius of the series was the ambivalence as to whether the village, its inhabitants and the sheepdog bubble itself (called Rover) were real/partially real or whether we were observing the Prisoner’s dream state, induced by his captors to find out how much he knew. Was this why I had been transported to Portmerion?

This will happen if you can't remember what you learned at Portmerion

Hardly. I didn’t put my hand up once to ask a clever question, fearing the bubble would drag me out as soon as I brought tin robots or whippets into the Big Conversation but nobody noticed, much less dragged me off in an airbag. My engulfing bubble on the Heath was the dread of explaining to Julia that despite inviting me to the most stimulating and sometimes surreal weekend I have spent for a very long time, in the company of some of the most stellar minds in this or any other chiliocosm, my tendency for transference activity was once again getting the better of me. For example, revelations from Nassim Taleb that the best laid plans of mice and men always conform to SNAFU were merely reinforcing my resolve to arse around in life and achieve little. My new best friend Sylvia Earle’s plangent exposition of the wanton destruction of our oceans moved me almost to tears but didn’t stop me from discussing 1950s American nudist postcards and the vanishing folk art of ice cream vans when I sat next to the great lady at dinner.

I walked on the beach with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted and Sylvia Plath, two of my favourite poets, an original bard herself and a painter of profound physical and psychological depth, discussing big motorbikes (Frieda rides one, in mitigation). At breakfast with Human Rights diva Baroness Helena Kennedy I turned the conversation to Glasgow hardmen. I simply frolicked in the anarchic slipstream of my heroine, Miriam Margolyes. But I was one of the lads, to all intents and purposes. The genius of Portmerion is partly the geniuses but also the Thusness of the whole shebang. We’re all names, not numbers, individuals with collective responsibility to do the best we can. Julia’s genius is her understanding of the palette of personalities.

The overarching message, if there was one, was probably wasted on me, like the time I met the Dalai Lama and spent the few seconds in the presence of a Realised Being wondering if he was wearing a Casio or a Rolex. But if you get the chance, go to the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers Symposium. For a taste of the Portmerion conversation, listen to The Forum on the BBC World Service. Make an effort to see Beeban Kidron’s documentary on the Devadasi. iPod the EI podcasts. Read anything by Frieda Hughes and Sylvia Earle’s ‘The World is Blue.’ Imagine Simon Schama having a bloody good knees up in the bar at 2 am then delivering a multidimensional summary of all the big ideas of the past 2500 years six hours later. Try to understand Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan then imagine he was sitting next to you on the bus, which, by the way, was one of those executive football team coaches with leather seats and a big round sofa at the back with loads of snacks and Sky TV  . . .  Jesus, is that the bubble again? Be seeing you.

John J Kelly

PS. Here’s a handy link to all the videos and podcasts from Portmerion

Queens University researchers have discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called pillocks. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that

Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many pillocks but twice as many morons.

In those great days we were helped by the US, then Imperial apprentices, now big swinging dicks. This time we have stopped short of war. Instead, our very own Great Helmsman, Gordon Brown, recognising the media opportunity, interrupted his Yuletide wassailing to summon the Chinese Ambassador, twice, no less, to the Foreign Office for a stern telling-off. The insolent Chinamens’ excuse was that smuggling more than 50 mg of heroin was an offence punishable by death under their sovereign laws, and claimed that the perpetrator’s 5 kg stash was enough to maim or kill more than 27,000 people. This overlooked the fact that he was British, possibly (but not provenly) suffering from bipolar syndrome (aka manic depression) and was clearly (provenly) delusional – as evidenced by a terrible song which he believed would make him a pop star. Tragic, but hardly worth provoking an international incident.

British heroin smuggler Akmal Shaikh knew what he was doing and did it for money. Bipolar syndrome does not imply the inability to determine right from wrong. China, like all the other countries which endorse or carry out the death penalty – notably the US – should be urged to join the civilised world, but Gordon Brown and his hypocrite cronies are hardly the folk to make them change their point of view. China executes the most people in absolute terms, but is 14th when per capita judicial killing is taken into account, with the US close behind. The Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation, is top. Singapore, held up as a paragon state by unconvicted mass murderer Tony Blair – is second. Kuwait, whose ‘democratic freedom’ we defended in the first Gulf War, is sixth. British trading partners Jordan, Oman and Saudi Arabia are all in the top 10.

None of these countries are daft enough to execute a British, much less a US citizen, though Singapore and our lovely Saudi friends have been known to administer the cat o’ nine tails to errant expats for boozing/fornicating, while Thailand and Malaysia have mostly commuted the death sentence for EU citizens caught smuggling drugs (usually out of the country). Afghanistan, of course, is the world’s top exporter of heroin grade opium, while the brother of its democratically-elected and UN endorsed President, the fragrant Hamid Karzai (Thus passim ad nauseam) is allegedly Capo di Tutti Capi of the smack barons. But he’s our man, as banana boy Miliband is wont to remind us.

I’m sad for the family of Akmal Shaikh, but this is not about the rights and wrongs of a tragic individual case. It’s about the rank, steaming hypocrisy of a country which scarcely raised a finger in protest when 1200 citizens of occupied Gaza, mostly women and children, were bombed out of existence precisely one year earlier, on December 27, 2oo8. Britain defended the ‘sovereign right’ of Iraq’s corrupt whacko puppets to publicly hang Saddam Hussein after a laughable show trial. As the Chinese pointed out, a country which has played a lead role in the killing and maiming of at least 200,000 Iraqi citizens and displacement of up to 4 million others, killed and wounded thousands of Afghanis and a growing number of Pakistanis, is in no position to point any fingers whatsoever. The same government gave Chinese Premier Wen a regal welcome in 2008 and brutally suppressed protests from Free Tibet campaigners on his triumphal procession through London before the Beijing Olympics. China was executing/ murdering dissidents (as well as common criminals, for offences less than murder) then as now. We’ll continue to buy its tat, often produced in slave labour conditions. We even sold them our beloved car company, Rover (although this could rank as a subtly hostile act).

This week, 10 Afghan citizens, including 8 children, were executed/murdered by US ‘Special Forces’, according to Afghan investigators. The US claim they were militants/terrorists. Even if they were, does this justify execution without trial of these and several thousand others on other sovereign territories? Ask Brown and Miliband. You won’t get a straight answer.

Britain has lost the high, middle and low ground in international diplomacy, and our citizens will suffer commensurately, as surely as we will lose the phony ‘war on terror.’

However distasteful and repugnant, China’s judicial killing of a British citizen carries more legitimacy than the countless acts of extra-judicial killing perpetrated daily by the US under the banner of liberal intervention. Both are crimes against humanity, but to paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy. 1000 is a statistic.

John J Kelly

Gordon Brown (the ugly one on the left) congratulates Colonel Gaddafi, thinking he is Sarah Boyle, winner of Britain's Got Talent

Over the past three days, as the Lockerbie ‘terrorist’ release turns into a full-blown international incident, we have heard not one word, or even a Twitter, from the man who saved the wurreld (and its banks). This is highly unusual; Gordon and his wife Sarah Twittered from Inverkilliecrankie, or wherever they are on holiday, catching crabs and burying each other in the sand, when the ungrateful Evil Empire dissed the NHS. This time it’s serious. Somebody gave Gordon’s independent-minded fellow Jocks a pass to give Abdulbasset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, a get out of gaol free card on the spurious pretext that he had less than three months to live.

Let’s leave aside the mountain of evidence that al Megrahi and Libya probably didn’t do it. He was threatening to appeal, a process which would have certainly opened the UK and US to wide and embarrassing scrutiny of their highly circumstantial fingering of Libya, then THE axis of the axis of evil, now everybody’s best friend and a bulwark against terror. Blame switched from Syria, the HQ of the PFLP- GQ terrorist cell allegedly paid by Iran to carry out the bombing as revenge for the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 six months earlier (1988) by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians, when Syria joined the Bush 1 and Thatcher ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the first Gulf War. Let’s ignore Scottish due process which dictates that a terminally ill prisoner should be released on compassionate grounds to die in dignity. Let’s ignore the oft-repeated fact that post-devolution, Scotland makes its own decisions in law. Let’s try and pretend that Britain isn’t the 51st US state, even if the antics of the past few years have understandably left the opposite impression.

Let’s try and focus on the facts. Last Friday UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband furiously demanded that BBC news presenter John Humphrys retract the ‘slur’ that the FCO had anything to do with it. Today’s Sunday Times revealed that Ivan Lewis, UK Foreign Minister responsible for Libya, ‘is said to have written to the Scottish government, encouraging officials to send home’ al-Megrahi. Ten days ago ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson, Business Secretary and de facto ruler of Great Britain, admitted discussing the subject a couple of weeks ago with Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif at the Rothschild villa in Corfu. Today, after a mysterious prostate operation (in sympathy with al Megrahi or the result of some other sort of probe?) Mandelson broke his own uncharacteristic silence to declare it ‘offensive to claim’ that this meeting was connected to the release of the Libyan or to trade deals, despite the fact that Saif-al-Islam Gaddafi had emphatically declared the opposite. Colonel Gaddafi, meanwhile, has effusively thanked just about everybody in the UK:

Sarkozy is pissed off because he thought he was welcoming Michael Jackson to the G20 Summit. All Gaddafi had to offer was unlimited supplies of oil, gas and cash, though he performed a passable moonwalk.

“To my friends in Scotland, the Scottish National Party, and Scottish prime minister, and the foreign secretary, I praise their courage for having proved their independence in decision making despite the unacceptable and unreasonable measures that they faced. Nevertheless they took this courageously right and humanitarian decision.” And I say to my friend Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, his Government, the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth, and Prince Andrew, who all contributed to encouraging the Scottish Government to take this historic and courageous decision, despite the obstacles.” (Reuters).

Barack Obama came slowly out of the traps to declare the decision ‘highly objectionable.’ Despite the fact that the release of al Megrahi was ‘on the agenda at every meeting between Blair and Libyan officials’ it was highly OK for St Tony to broker a return of Libya to the international coalition of the hypocrites in 2004 when we realised we were running out of oil and there was rather a lot of it there, not to mention a strongman capable of bullying the bejasus out of many of the the other whackjobs in Africa, especially Sudan, and Mahgreb Middle East. Despite the fact that we knew more than a week before it happened that this release was on the cards, FBI Head, Robert Mueller, sent a hissy letter expressing outrage and astonishment to Kenny MacAskill, Scottish Justice Minister, clearly intended for public consumption (printed in full in The Times). Various neocons (and David Cameron) have postured their horror at the release of this convicted terrorist and outrage at his hero’s welcome in Tripoli as though this was a bolt from the blue.

Exclusive: what they found when they operated on Mandy's prostate - a banana AND a Miliband.

Those are the facts. Here’s some outrageous speculation. Gordon Brown desperately needs sovereign funds. Mandelson told him that this was a small step to take and that nobody would bother once the dust had settled, and anyway, his new friend (and UK homeowner) Gaddafi jr had assured him the return of al Megrahi would pass off quietly. Scotland, an oil and gas economy, was promised lucrative oil supply contracts and plentiful exports of Dundee rock, Irn Bru, tartan and sporrans. The US agreed to turn a blind eye on the condition that Gaddafi refrained from dancing the Highland Fling. Besides, it’s a big bonus if al Megrahi dies without making an appeal – the dirty secrets surrounding massive CIA manipulation of witnesses and evidence, including the possibility that Pan Am Flight 103 was carrying US secret service contraband die with him. Mandelson wins either way: if Brown is discomfited and if the Scottish National Party is put in the hole, his task of bullying the Labour Party is strengthened (Labour desperately needs seats in Scotland in the upcoming General Election). The inconvenient truth is that Colonel Gaddafi is a loony and his son appears to be a blowhard, so the whole yellow ribbon homecoming was unfortunate, but you can’t win them all. Champagne all round at Chateau Rothschild, Corfu branch. Another dinner guest has provided immense entertainment value on the international stage.

John J Kelly

“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Saying.

This quote, possibly the biggest cliché in the environmental literature, inspired Jared Diamond’s seminal work “Collapse“. But humans seem to succumb to boredom fairly quickly, so the real crisis, which is after all about something as mundane as food, has slipped off of the radar. The global meltdown of the banks, a grand Greek drama of the folly of the gods if ever there was one, has captured our attention. Have the problems with food thus disappeared? I think not. They are here to stay and getting stronger.

The problems we saw with the huge price rise in 2008 are still around, bio-fuels, huge agri-businesses exploiting market power, and so on. It is a myth that this was driven by increased demand from China and India, downwards pressure on wages in developing countries has actually reduced per capita food intake in the poor majority of these countries. Adding speculation in food markets yields a lovely recipe for population control (Thus Passim). Over the past two years, evidence has grown of the impact of Climate Change on agriculture. An FAO report by Cline in 2007 put agricultural yield losses by 2080 at between 5 and 20% globally. This hid a regional picture where India could lose 30-40% of its yield. As if this was not enough, he pointed out the glaringly obvious problem with equilibrium models, which mean even greater declines in food production.

These models assume systems tending to a steady state, and are used in both agro-economics and climate modeling. They mask extreme events and chaotic systems that refuse to settle down. Extreme weather is a fact of life in India, whose climate is driven by the dynamic monsoon weather system. No-one quite knows how this system will respond to changes in climate, but what we do know is that around 40% of India’s population depend directly on the rain. They live in terror of extreme weather, and this year, with a major drought from failure of the monsoon, India is importing food again. This just after India signed an accord to turn land over to fuel production to help keep American engines going.

Finally, there is sea-level rise to consider, something also not included in Cline’s report. For instance Egypt is facing the loss of much of its prime agricultural lands along the Nile Delta. So worry about the banks that hold in your money all you like, the food problem is not going away.

Despite the glaring evidence that Afghanistan is a failed state whose conditions have significantly worsened under the Karzai regime, and his abysmal popularity ratings, apathy abroad may assure his victory. There is an undeniable imbalance in the reporting of the campaign. According to the Ghani campaigners: “While the international community considers the race for president to be wide open, even bringing top officials to meet individually with leading candidates, the international media relies on weak tools to support its conclusion that Hamid Karzai will win. This is the first election where an incumbent is being challenged an election in Afghanistan. “Statistical” data is weak. The voting “behavior” of Afghans is not parallel to other countries. Polling is notoriously difficult and unreliable. Yet still many in the media are taking Hamid Karzai and his bought-off “analysts” at their word that he is certain to win.”

There is genuine reason to fear that after over 30 years of occupation by foreign forces intent on imposing overweening ideologies – Soviet Totalitarianism and the tragically-tainted version of US Democracy – by military might, to the despair and radicalisation of the suffering population, Afghanistan is too far gone and that occupation worsens the situation. This view was eloquently argued by Rory Stewart, on a BBC Newsnight special last Monday. Stewart, a patrician Old Etonian, follows the time-honoured English patrician penchant of wearing flowing robes at every possible opportunity and mucking in with the natives. For this reason he has acquired the title “Lawrence of Belgravia.” He now lectures at Harvard, but lived in Kabul for several years and thus speaks from experience – something which I for one don’t possess. He argued earlier this year that the Afghan military surge ‘option’ would fail (as it failed in Iraq, unless the definition of success is cementing the position of the militias). The Russians, arguably masters of ‘surging’ – throwing vast amounts of troops and armament into hopeless situations with scant regard for civilians – lost in excess of 35,000 soldiers in Afghanistan by their own (understated) reckoning. Yet they trounced Georgia in a week, despite the US-appointed ‘strongman’ Saakashvili’s supporting cast of Israeli advisors and US arms and subdued Chechnya in a vicious attritional campaign (where they installed their own bonkers warlord strongman). I’m certainly not endorsing Russian aggression in Georgia, much less Chechnya – another failed state. My point is that the Russians aren’t dummies and they certainly fought dirtier than the Nato forces, yet they failed in Afghanistan. The current occupiers will fare no better.

‘Imposing’ democracy on Afghanistan through the military might of an occupying force can only make a bad situation worse. Ashraf Ghani is right to assert that supporting an endemically corrupt regime in the name of ‘democracy’ is criminally counter-productive. Until and unless the foundations of a civil society are put in place, democracy stands no chance. Neither do the supporting cast in the Afghan elections if the international media persists in reporting the election as if the choice of Leader is a side issue on a chessboard where warring rooks, knights and bishops play centre stage, the pawns are sacrificed and the king is a cypher. That’s OK as a representation of Medieval feudal statesmanship, but no model of democracy.

John J Kelly

The electorate has returned  a centre-left government with an increased majority.  A government that is broadly seen as competent and relatively un-corrupt, at least for Indian politics. Manmohan Singh, the left-leaning economist returns to power again based on his economic track record. The comparison with the UK is telling. India’s left-wing politicians are actually allowed to say ‘no’ to some forms of deregulation.  However Delhi insiders say that India’s relatively unscathed passage through the latest economic storm was more due to inertia in the system than planning: they simply could not liberalise fast enough. This was then claimed as a victory when the winds changed. Whatever the case, India emerges from this election as a functioning democracy and economy.

Whilst the inertia of a huge Federal system sometimes prevents ideological excess becoming policy, it is also the greatest source of political frustration here. Poverty is still the bleeding sore of Indian politics, and economic development the great hope. Overcoming inertia has become a rallying cry to the developmentalist core of both the main political groupings, the Congress-led United People’s Alliance (UPA) and the Hindu Nationalist led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

On the NDA side, the disappointing performance by 81 year-old leader Lal Krishna Advani during this election has opened the way for the controversial governor of Gujurat, Narendra Modi, to move towards the top. He is alleged to have stood by as Muslims were massacered in Gujurat in 2002, and as an almost neo-fascistic figure. But under him Gujurat has grown at 10% a year, so he is also known as the guy who knows how to get things done in India.

This frustration at the inertia of Indian democracy is also seen in the ruling Congress camp. The serving home minister Chidambaram came out in the Indian press in 2006 to say that India was “willing to tolerate debate, and perhaps even dissent, as long as it does not come in the way of 8 per cent growth”. The rising star on the Congress side Rahul Gandhi, has taken issue with this approach. Chidambaram is known for having represented both Enron and Vedanta Resources in the Bombay High Court, both very controversial companies known for getting their way by legal means or otherwise. Chidambaram also served on Vedanta’s board of directors before landing a ministerial role. Rahul Gandhi came out publicly in opposition to Vedanta’s plans to mine the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. He represents, with his qualification in Development Studies, a new pro-poor politics not exclusively centered in Industry, in contrast to the MBA-bearing Chidambaram.

This struggle will continue in Indian politics, with the need to include and protect the poor during liberalisation balanced against the basic need to get things done in a very complex and corrupt federal system. This will be a telling challenge, as Indian politicians will need to show that Democracy is a viable form of politics in the times ahead. If China uses its autocratic model to respond to calls to cut its carbon emmisions much more rapidly and effectively than India, how will that make democracy look? Given that China’s social statistics are so much better than India’s, the case for democracy would begin to wear thin – too much inertia may not be seen as a good thing, and the decisive authoritarians, like Modi, will perhaps more and more be seen as the way forward.

There are signs of hope in India, the Congress government was voted back in partly because its pro-poor policies have started to have some impact. The subsidies on food and fuel held during the 2008 price spike, and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has started to make inroads into rural misery, which has been on the rise since 1990 in India. The same congress government saw through the Right to Information Act. This act made uncovering corruption much easier, making it harder for big companies to cut corners (and thus throats) in their rush to get things done. So let’s hope that India comes up with the goods, and those that wish to protect the poor through the use of democratic means can prove that it works.

A scientist advises everyone to wear daft masks, except when entering a bank, government installation or standing in front of CCTV cameras, all of which may provoke symptoms of police-related fatality

Thus has belatedly contracted Clown Fever, a pandemonium of utter bollocks sweeping the globe, whose symptoms include jabbering about mutating viruses as though it was a done deal. I do confess myself awestruck by the ease in which overpaid Geneva NGO Strangelovess at the World Health Organisation can apply a Lickert scale to the improbable/impossible, add the word ‘pandemic’, create wholesale panic and be fulsomely praised for their efforts. It’s akin to paying outrageous sums to a bunch of wierdos in Lausanne for the privilege of convincing despotic regimes to run around bullying everyone with the Olympic flame, bankrupting cities building pointless velodromes and Tae Kwan Do mega dojos and creating hostage-taking scenarios in the name of sport. We all know it will end in tears, but we go along with it, because it gives us something to moan, pontificate and generally waffle about (as I’m doing now). Clown Fever and it will mutate into something else soon, so don’t put that mask on yet. Swine Flu – or H1N1 – the name has mutated to a more deadly James Bondy sounding acronym – has now been downgraded from deadly to a bit of a sniffle. This hides the really interesting part. Usually disasters grow in the telling. Estimates of earthquake deaths, for example, are usually improbably low. (I was on the edges of the 1998 Izmir earthquake and remember hearing initial estimates that only 110 were dead. Though no seismologist, it was clear that you needed to add a couple of noughts to get close). I hope it’s because we want to wish for the best possible outcome – think low and maybe it won’t be as bad as all that. But a pandemic – the widescale distribution of an  ’epidemic,‘ a disease whose virulence exceeds normal expectations behaves differently in the media, and quickly spreads to governments. Quarantine me if you like, but I’m not wearing a mask or sneezing into the crook of my elbow, however many trillions of leaflets Gordon Brown prints or mad scientists appear on the news interviewing jobsworths and showing crazy blowups of viruses. 

Call me cynical, but I didn’t believe that ‘up to a million’ would die in the UK, the majority from Ealing and Barnet, according to the Metro free newspaper that I unhygenically read over the shoulder of a passenger in the plague-friendly confines of the London Underground last week. Neither do I believe The Economist’s current cover story, that although it may be clever to sneer, the worst is yet to come and the WHO has done the right thing. They told us that invading Iraq was a good idea and their cartoons are simply not funny. 

The dead arose and appeared to many - the death toll has actually fallen in the current pandemic

There would be reason to be fearful if we weren’t arriving at the uncomfortable truth that far from the original 179 deaths in Mexico, the ‘real’ figure is now 101. That’s a 56% drop, spooky stuff even for the country that celebrates the Dia de los Muertos when the dead arise and lark about. Technically it’s an epidemic, given that the flu can be transmitted ‘human to human’ but so is virtually every form of virus and all forms of flu (which apparently kills up to 250,000 people worldwide every year, according to the same WHO – note the phrase ‘up to’ – another symptom of Clown Flu). Technically it’s a pandemic, in that it has spread to quite a few countries. We in Britain (naturally the most-prepared nation, according to Great Helmsman Gordon) isolated and hospitalised two Scottish honeymooners, recently returned from Mexico, who passed on the flu to their friend, who has also recovered. Other countries are rushing to produce victims. Lebanese folk has been forbidden to greet each other with kisses on both cheeks. Egypt has set about slaughtering all its 250,000 pig population for no scientific reason whatsoever and with no reported victims. Gordon Brown has spent £150 million of borrowed cash on masks and has visited a call centre. All symptoms of Clown Flu.

This flu, or any other, cannot be compared to ‘pandemics’ such as Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Avian Flu (SARS) or, for that matter, Bubonic Plague. The circumstances and prevailing levels of health of those affected in all cases, not to mention medical aid available, all played a huge part in the mortality rates. I’m genuinely sorry for the poor Mexicans who died – I bet they were literally poor – but we haven’t heard that much about them thus far. The overwhelming majority of those who died from SARS were dirt poor agricultural/factory labourers in unhygenic conditions. The 1968 pandemic mostly killed old and infirm people (as did the unseasonal cold weather in continental Europe last year). The 1918 flu epidemic needs no explanation. Neither does the 1347 Black Death. 

Millions die every year of malaria and tuberculosis, eminently curable diseases, for the same reason: they are poor. A spot of flu isn’t going to kill us all. Clown Fever, whereby the media go berserk and governments run in circles, screaming and shouting like hysterics at a Dia de los Muertos festival, is an endemic global media condition affecting common sense: far more difficult to control, much less to eradicate. 

John J Kelly

   Lula da Silva says this problem was caused by white men with blue eyes. That lets both of us off the hook

Several Latin American leaders have reported the same disturbing hallucination. A rumpled fat man with a very large head, dressed in a cheap suit and badly-knotted tie turns up unannounced and tries to get them to commit to spending vast sums of money, which they do not have, on unspecified things which they do not need. ‘At first I thought it was the Man from Del Monte,’ said an anonymous victim, ‘but he insisted his mission was bigger than pineapple chunks and concerned nothing less than saving the world’s poor from the wasteful antics of the world’s rich. I pointed out that it was ‘white men with blue eyes’ who had caused the problem. At that point he took out his false eye and said “well in that case, it wasnee me.” My friend Cristina Kirchner says he recommended ‘quantitative easing’ but it sounded like Peronist hyper-inflation. When she politely asked him about the Malvinas, he said; “Exactly. Remember the Belgrano. Vote yes to excess and nobody gets hurt, Evita.”

‘When I recommended that he went to see President Chavez of Venezuela, who has vowed to cut spending on mobile phones, parties, cakes, pointless trips abroad and wasteful public projects, the Man from Del Monte said Hugo was a publicity-crazed megalomaniac, friend of someone called Red Ken, only interested in nationalising banks and keeping global assets such as oil and gas to himself and helping troublemakers like Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Besides, only the top 20 countries by GDP were invited (including the EU, which wasn’t yet a country). 

“The Man from Del Monte promised plenty of snatch squads, riots and mayhem, tasers and coshing just like the old days in Latin America. “These people dinna ken that giving billions of dollars to bankers would help the world’s poor,” he said. “But look at Fred Goodwin. He rose from poverty to become the UK’s highest paid pensioner – and he’s only 50.” I said I was unaware of this Fred Shred man, but that his friend George Soros, who had helped the UK in the past by selflessly keeping it out of the European Monetary System and making $1 billion dollars on the side, had said that the focus should be on the developing economies. I said that Mrs. Merkel had put two fingers up to his proposal that Germany become a Weimar Republic again, and that the world’s bond markets had failed to see the logic of his masterplan, failing to buy less than £2 billion of UK gilts. “The world’s poor bankers won’t forget that,” he growled, “and neither will the Bilderberg boys if you don’t join the coalition of those willing to spend recklessly and print pretend money – you did it in the past, why not now?” When I asked him if Barack Obama was coming, the Man from Del Monte, he say “Yes. I’m taking him to dinner at a jive club and buying him an Arctic Monkeys T shirt. Plus, the police have orders not to stop his car when he travels through Brixton.”  ”Why didn’t you say so earlier, fat boy, I’ll be on the next plane,” I said, “But why are you holding your G20 photo opportunity in a horrible docklands warehouse in a bankrupt country?” “It’s symbolic of the new economic landscape we’re all working towards creating,” said the Man from Del Monte. ‘And, anyway, that’s where we’re holding the Olympics, too.”

John J Kelly