Horses for Courses.

Horses For Courses

BRITISH proverb - different people are suited to different things.

In Europe we have many, many divergent needs and pressures. Europe (the continent not including the Russian Federation) has a population of approximately 740 million people. Within this grouping of countries and protectorates there are two other important divisions, the European Union which is a political family of nations legislated over by the European Parliament (EP) and managed by the European Commission (EC); and the Eurozone, where the currency is the Euro (€) and the economy is regulated by the European Central Bank (ECB).

The population of the European Union is approximately 505 million people whereas the approximate population within the Eurozone is just 258 million. It is important to understand the vast difference between these groupings and their respective populations when we think about markets and sectors and economies.

What has brought the European project, which has revitalised culture, stability and prosperity for the 740 million people of the European continent, so close to jeopardy is a focus on the needs of an economic system (The Euro) that serves just a third of Europe’s population.   

This is the flaw in the European model of economic management.  The more populous countries within the Eurozone (Germany, Italy and France) seek to dominate the destiny of the continent as a whole. The means by which they hope to do so is the economic theory of Neo-Liberalism.

Now, for Northern Italy, Northern France and Germany, the Neo-Liberal focus on profit and controlling inflation models work for the majority of their interests.Keeping inflation low aids the export of finished products. This is not true for the other sixteen economies that are not so tied to large scale manufacturing, technology and international export. What is happening now to Greece is a denial of basic economics in favour of a state of affairs that serves only an advanced, industrialised nation. 

As with my last blog, “Beyond Protest, The New Deal”, I come not to decry Europe but to show how the Irish Democratic Party has moved beyond the limited thinking so prevalent within the Troika. There is a better way to make Europe boom.

To the uneducated eye it would appear that the Troika (IMF, ECB and the EC) are hell bent on tearing up the entire European project just so they can cover the bets for a banking failure that is now nearly a decade old. What is happening, in my opinion, is a group of people highly trained in a particular field and a particular branch of that field and a particular process within that branch of that field are using the same remedy to solve the issues of a diverse continent. 

Let’s look at Economics just for a moment. Like you, I am also sick of having to learn about a dry, mercantile subject which neither intrigues me nor grabs my attention. I was happy to let the bean counters count their beans as I explored technology, arts and literature until it was too late to stop the contagion of flawed economic theory causing unnecessary hardship and misery on people who cannot pay. Here is the breakdown of how the European economic system is analysed.

Let’s begin with Economic Sectors:

Primary Sectors:  This refers to production and extraction of raw materials including agriculture. Primary sectors supply materials and also supplies to other sectors.  This provides a solid foundation for a country’s economy (as long as the resource remains economically available)

Secondary Sectors: This refers to all activities related to conversion of raw materials into finished products. (Industrial model)  This generates large scale employment for educated / industrially trained and un/semi-skilled labour forces.

Tertiary Sectors: This refers to the production of services and intangible goods.  This includes the professions (Law, Medicine, Finance, Advertising, Transportation)

Quaterany Sectors: This refers to intellectual activities in an economy including culture, media, government, information technology, scientific research, energy applications etc.  This can provide future employment and wealth. (Speculative model)

Politically we also have:

Public Sector: This refers to all economic activities that are owned and managed by government agencies and thus are accountable to the electorate. Public transportation, health, social security, national defense etc.  (Sustainable model)

Private Sector: Refers to economic activities owned and managed by private institutions.  (Profit making model).

Quango: is a compromise between public and private sectors in which government owns and private institutions manage the sector in trust for the state. (Stewardship model)  

Private ownership of resources and functions will inevitably require a profit model.
Deliberate loss making of a function in order to liquidate government responsibility of said sector diminishes accountability and confuses mission/model.

Voluntary or Civil Sector: This refers to all economic or beneficial activities carried out by the population on a voluntary / non profit seeking basis or by non-government agents. This sector usually provides some of the basic needs for the vulnerable and under threat members of the population.  This sector is as essential as any other.

Each sector has differing demands and behaviours. The private model will have vastly different behaviours to public and stewardship models. The voluntary sector will inevitably fail if it deploys a profit seeking model. Government functions should avoid being manoeuvred to compete against privately owned functions as one is designed to be constant and sustainable and boring while the other is designed to be innovative and faddish and profitable in the short to medium term.

Neo Liberalism is a panacea for short to medium term economic conditions which reveal profit and wealth to an investor section of the private sector which then (theoretically) reinvests in the sector to expand it. If you have a large, rich and well developed economy, Neo Liberalism can provide a much needed jolt to kick start innovation and sharpen competition up.  This, I acknowledge.

Using Neo Liberal procedures on a stagnant and declining market is like a dentist yanking out a slowly rotting tooth. There’s pain and it’s unpleasant but the risk of infection and blood poisoning is averted. The failing companies are broken up and their resources and expertise is better deployed by more agile companies. That’s when Neo Liberalism works; that’s the ONLY time where Neo Liberalism works.

In every other situation Neo Liberalism is like a dentist yanking out a healthy tooth because he is a freaking sadist. To pull a person’s healthy teeth is to torture that person; likewise to impose Neo Liberal theory on an under developed, long term or poor economy is to torture its people. Neo Liberalism’s history when it is deployed in the incorrect situation isn’t what one would call ‘chequered’ or ‘hit and miss’; it is the history of near uniform brutality,  murder, torture, child kidnapping, rape, crime, organ farming, mass suicide and continuing poverty and dependence for its victims. 

Which begs the question: 

If Neo Liberalism has failed so horribly badly with such trauma on the population in the past why are supposedly sane and rational people championing it in Europe?  

The answer is one of the following:

A)   They are part of a Satanic Nazi death cult and are hell bent on starting World War III by which they hope to rule the world.

B)   They are completely motivated by personal greed and couldn’t care less about the rest of us because they are simply addicted to money.

C)   They are shape shifting lizards that need the planet to overheat so their eggs can hatch and repopulate the world after the last Ice Age decimated them.

D)   They don’t know any other means to tackle an economic crash of this length and magnitude and they don’t want to admit that to the rest of us.

Personally, I’m going with D because imagining Jean Claude Juncker laying a dinosaur size egg or Christiane Lagarde in a kinky leather uniform is just too disturbing.

So, what I am proposing here is creative, informed, radical and innovative in a way that only Europe is capable of innovating. This is because only Europe enjoys the requisite industry, technological advancement, political stability, cultural variance and physical wealth in resources and climates to actually pull this world-saving trick off. 

Granted, in a few decades, I hope that the Nations of South America will have attained the necessary wealth and education to do it and in a century I would hope that the nations of sub-Saharan Africa could also coalesce this creatively. I perceive that China also has most of the ducks in a row to do this but there is a centralising mania about the Chinese communist party which militates against this leap of faith.

So what is this great new idea?

Horses for courses: Let the economic model reflect the reality on the ground.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing; the entire process in a nutshell. Let the economic planning reflect what is ACTUALLY there as opposed to an assumptive model for a completely different set of circumstances.  How we got to this point is truly beyond me; there is a cult-like group-think going on in economic theory especially in US and Eurocentric circles that would put a girls’ school clique of ink monitors to shame. 

Now, if you have been following my blogs for any amount of time you will have noticed that I have a bit of a love affair with the word ‘Actually’. I have very little patience with ivory tower thinking which ignores the facts on the ground just so the theory can tie up all the loose ends and look coherent and representative.  It’s the same kind of woolly thinking that lies behind whichever fad diet and trendy exercise plan that gains popular purchase. Clearly the people we entrust to maintain the complex rhythms and fluctuations of 740 million people’s economic interests need to be immune to such herd mentality.

But here we are dealing with Neo Liberal ideas in a group of economies that do not merit its stringency and violence.  Notice that I said ‘group of economies’ because that is precisely what Europe - the continent - is and any theory that hopes to serve all agendas and satisfy all shortcomings will ultimately fail. 

When I was studying media in the 90’s I learned about the Eurimages fund which would endeavour to provide film and television finance for cross-border productions; e.g. The cameraman is Spanish, the lighting crew is Belgian, the director is Italian and the cast is Irish/Scottish/English and it is an historical drama set in Sweden.  These productions were rightly dubbed ‘Europudding’ by my colleagues and mentors as it resulted in unfocussed and watered down films nobody wanted to see.

This is the group think which has infected the very real science of international finance and economics. One cannot expect Thessaloniki to emulate Frankfurt; it just isn’t possible. A land mass that is mountainous and dry cannot possibly compete fairly with a flat, fertile land in agriculture; nor should it be expected to.

Instead of an all encompassing economic model, Europe requires a modular or regional economic approach.  This is how stable government is achieved, this is how efficient business is modelled and so, economically, our current centralisation is bad modelling.

What I am proposing is a departure from a centralised ‘one size fits all’ economic model to a regional ‘economies trading together’ model. European regions will be responsible for ensuring their internal national economies find and exploit synergies and cross fertilisation; it entices neighbouring nations of Europe co-operate together and to excel at what they are good at. Each region will develop a coherent plan for that reflects the best outcome for their domestic economies creating trust, stability and quality of life for even the least developed state (which was the original vision anyway), whilst safeguarding the region’s cultural and political heritage.

This last element cannot be emphasised enough, it is Europe’s unique diversity of peoples and cultures that makes it such a superb hot house for innovation. This will also calm relations between this continent and our larger neighbour, the Russian Federation because trade always trumps empire.

So to get to the point:  Horses for courses....letting people do what they do best.

Let’s imagine Europe not as one unit as we have been lulled into thinking but as a business with different departments. The business requires every sector to operate at its optimum to provide for the rest of the departments. For instance, the finance department needs to have the expertise to differentiate between the financial needs of the production line and the logistics department. The supply chain ideally doesn't rely on imported raw materials when there is the same raw material available locally. The personnel department needs to be able to assess the potential of each employee and to assign that employee where their talents will best serve the business.  The board of management has a representative of each department sitting and present to best inform the CEO what the status is department by department.  

Only then can a business truly know its business needs and be able to grow.

So let’s get back to what is actually on the ground. Europe has a great advantage over other Global markets because it enjoys practically the full range of climates and land masses required to compete globally. Europe enjoys fertile land, minerals, carbon deposits, diverse and adaptive peoples, a natural habitat that is largely safe, a Cinderella range of temperatures and rainfall, advanced technologies, potent military capability, an excellent logistical and urban infrastructure and, most importantly, political stability.  Let's ensure that this essential stability is the first priority and not just an afterthought. 

Each state has something to bring to the Europe Inc. table whether it is natural resource, technological advancement or just willing and skilled labour. Each state also comes with a series of needs and requirements that a combination of other states can satisfy to further copper-fasten the essential political stability and cultural wealth to ensure that rampaging ideologies do not gain significant purchase.

Now it is time for Europe – the continent – to take stock of its place in the world of the 21^st Century and assess its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  Let’s start with resources which includes the people and how they live:

North Atlantic Europe: Population  56 Million

(Iceland, Ireland, Ulster, Wales, Northern England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Isle of Man, Faroe Islands, Denmark)

Socio-Political overview:
Centrist or settled politics, median population density (less than 10 million), highly educated, good language skills, ageing demographic. High standard of living. Inward migration into the trades and professions sector.

Primary Sector: Agriculture, Fisheries, Natural resource energy,  

Secondary Sector: Natural material products (Wood, glass, ceramic, metal), Petrochemical refining, Chemical industries, Engineering,  

Tertiary Sector: Pharmaceuticals, Financial and legal services, technology sector. 

Quaterany Sector: Software, Cultural products, Seasonal tourism, Internal and international Education

Public Sector: Public functions mostly on Social Democratic levels (Primary and Secondary Education, Health, Policing, Military Service, Transport)

Private Sector: Some Private presence in the public sphere (Third level Education, Private clinics, Security, inter-city transport, air-travel)

Civil Sector: Cultural, Community, Developed civil service, social involvement.

Regional Recommendation: Keynsian mixed economics with a focus on energy applications, education and technology. In a decade this sector should focus on trialing an energy economy using resources and technology.

(In the same map above )

Baltic Europe:  Population 6.3 Million (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania)

Young and popular politics, median energy and coastal resources, engineering and mechanical ability, median population density, developing standard of living, varied economic ideas, developing technologies and IT infrastructure, productive agricultural sector, good language skills, skilled and trained population, ageing demographics. Outward migration pattern, developing infrastructure.

Primary Sector: Agriculture, Fisheries, Natural resource energy,  

Secondary Sector: Chemical industries, Engineering,  

Tertiary Sector: Industrial Technology sector

Quaterany Sector: Software, Cultural products, Internal and international Education

Public Sector: Public functions high levels (Primary and Secondary Education, Health, Policing, Military Service, Transport)

Private Sector: Increasing Private presence in the public sphere (Third level Education, Private clinics, Security, inter-city transport, air-travel)

Civil Sector: Cultural, Community, Developed civil service, social involvement.

Regional Recommendation: Growth and modernising economic model with an eye to developing the social and economic infrastructure over a decade to allow this region coalesce with the North Atlantic Region.

Capital / Central Europe: Population 272 Million.

(Southern and Midlands England, Northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Switzerland, Northern Italy) 

Socio-Political overview: Economically right wing / Neo-Liberal politics, High density population 10 Million +, Heavily industrialised, advanced services sector, advanced financial services sector, Advanced education and technology sectors, world class infrastructure, heavy inward migration patterns, mass exporter economies.

Primary Sector: Industrialised or intensive agriculture, some mining and energy extraction, renewable and nuclear energy economies.

Secondary Sector: Highly developed manufacturing and production for global export.

Tertiary Sector: Very large services sector, international services market, financial services capitals, highly developed luxuries market.

Quaterany Sector: Heavy cultural investment, large scale investment into heritage and tourism. Largest leisure and entertainment sector in Europe.

Public Sector: Public services depletion, public to private partnership model used for former public only services models on education, health, transport and security.

Private Sector: Expanding private sector supported by population density.

Civil Sector: “Urban needs” social investment and activism

Regional Recommendation: Continuing along Neo Liberal principles and financial services with minimal regulation. Imposing heavier regulation over the quality of produce and environmental security.  A decade long move to renewable energy generation. When the energy economy of the north has been trialled, a decision whether to adopt it as the foundation of the Euro or to continue with the current FIAT model.

Slavic / Eastern Europe: Population 50M

(Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Albania, FYR Macedonia)

Socio-Political overview: Unstable or reactionary Politics, ageing energy sector, developing technology, ageing engineering, low manufacturing levels, unemployment and taxation issues, poor infrastructure, large scale outward migration levels, ageing population, unstable civil sector with economic inequality.  Vast untapped natural resources and genuine wilderness.

Primary Sector: Raw materials sector still very rich, agriculture and viniculture.

Secondary Sector: Some engineering and manufacturing

Tertiary Sector: Personal services

Quaterany Sector: Low investment in intangible technologies and culture.

Public Sector: Heavy public service investment. 

Private Sector: Under developed private sector due to historical socialist control.

Civil Sector: Well developed civil and voluntary sector due to historical necessity.

Regional Recommendation: Developmental model economics along social democracy and rural working with ecological intervention. This region will supply much of the care and soft technology workers to the rest of Europe. This can also be an agricultural supplier to neighbouring states and economic zones. The largely unspoilt quality of this region will also attract tourism.

Mediterranean Europe: Population 178 Million

(Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Southern Italy, Sicily, Malta, South of France, Spain, Portugal)

Socio-Political overview: Reactionary Politics, ageing demographics with a heavy seasonal inward migration, a mixed energy sector, developing technology, ageing engineering, low manufacturing, water intensive farming, resources limited outside of climate.

Primary Sector: Tourism, Culture and Heritage, Agriculture and Viniculture, Market Garden Food Production, Coastal Resources and Fisheries.

Secondary Sector: Textiles and clothing manufacturing, viniculture, some luxuries

Tertiary Sector: Health care, homecare services.

Quaterany Sector: Culture, visual arts and literature, this is the ideal sector for Cinematic investment.

Public Sector: Heavily populated and expensive due to the needs of physical and cultural heritage of this sector.

Private Sector: Underdeveloped and small scale in comparison to Capital Europe

Civil Sector: A large movement of young activists and supporters.  

Regional Recommendation: Conservation economics, allowing for tourism and cultural heritage to continue.  Building in this area would best be regulated to ensure comfort and stability to the housing stock. Development of resorts to be kept apart from one another and more investment in attractions to extend the tourism season beyond the traditional three months.

The rationale behind this overview is to enable us at a glance to understand what each sector requires economically, socially, physically demographically, and intellectually.  We can then begin to assemble the tax, investment, and infrastructural strategies that would resolve that region’s largest challenges and also encourage an influx of new investment thus settling the economy in the median to long term.

The developing economic regions trade with the developed economic regions; just like the millennium lasting Roman Empire.  Plus, this would encourage the migration of peoples to settle down and find a workable equilibrium. The citizens of Europe already enjoy the freedom to travel but not necessarily to work which is insane. Europe is currently ‘importing’ people to do the work that Europeans can easily do but employers want to keep wages down. Thus economies contract due to a lack of spending on the streets and we lose.

If we had a ten year working permit for all Europeans in every state in Europe, that would encourage people to travel to the financially generous core to earn their wealth and then return to a less intensively populated country to raise their families.  This ensures that the pattern for migration and development within Europe's fringes is stable after ten years .

The secret behind this idea is that the majority of its economic expansion is internal and thus, its external trade can be freed up to appeal simply to the richest and most progressive markets. There is no point in a financially strong, ecologically balanced, and technologically advanced society engaging in a race to the bottom against large and densely populated, developing nations so loved by globalisers.

Such a race will ultimately be lost anyway.

Europe’s economic leaders took their eye off the ‘internal market’ ball in the mania for globalisation. Europe is in pole position to develop an internal market which is capable of running even after a global export ‘shock’ which interferes with the higher profit making functions. Forgetting this has cost the member states of Europe dearly.

Given free rein the unseen hand of Keynsian theory would have done this anyway but for the spread of an attractive and enticing theory called Neo-Liberalism. Sadly, like many attractive theories that promise untold wealth, it was based upon a fantasy and was about as credible as the three-card trick. It’s time to let the strategists back behind the wheel and to return the ‘a radical system to get rich quick’ brigade to the college auditoriums where they belong, dealing with 'what if?' questions and not the reality of people's lives. The sustainable economic model for Europe can only be one that is many models working together to enrich Europe as a whole and at different rates.

If we could come up with an internal working market which allowed Europeans to invest their most productive years into making the best possible salary and savings whilst also investing in their countries of origin that would be of far more use to Europe’s long term interests than having the one currency to rule them all.

It’s not an overnight solution; it’s a long term investment into a long term outcome.

When it was founded after the Second World War, Europe’s Economic Community had roughly this mission statement: “Live in peace and prosper together”

What’s wrong with honouring that mission statement?

We need to stop looking at Europe as one central market with poor cousins all around the edges. We need to stop thinking of our partners in trade as a burden or worse, satrap states. Capital Europe forgot how politics work and have pushed the voices of the vast majority of its citizens to the fringes. A new plan is needed which is based on the oldest plan we developed, one which lasted for centuries: The Roman Empire.  

What’s been lost over the last 45 years is the vision and the clarity of how a confederation of disparate nations can come together in peace and prosperity. In the eagerness to rush into federalisation and eurozone compliance, the basic structure of how government is set up has been lost. Without the oversight of local, national, regional, and only then EU central professionals, the potential for clientelism and corruption is massive but we already know this. It's not like we haven’t had Europe-wide power structures in our past. We invented continent spanning empires which relied on slave labour and cruelty. We overcame that addiction and so we can overcome the addiction of debt trading.

Presently all monies within the eurozone are controlled by the ECB and the EC.
Neither body is answerable to the vast majority of the people who pay for these bodies.  This isolation from the actual source of their income has allowed European technocrats to mentally picture their employers as subjects. European people have no interest in being under the thumb of any Emperors anytime soon.

What needs to happen is that each region pays its fair share into the central European pot in accordance with their population and economic development level whilst retaining the rest of the raised funds to develop and improve their regional functions in accordance with the wishes of the people actually living there.

Believe it or not, nearly every European wants their standard of living and their country’s economy to improve. The most efficient way to make this come to pass is to allow the regional assemblies decide their strategic plans based on the income they can raise internally, through trade with the other European regions, and THEN seeking to trade outside of the continent.

So we have our modern day Prefects, Regional Senators, Imperial Senators, Forum and a modern day Magesterium which answers to the Forum.  We need neither Emperor nor Dictator.  The will of the forum reflects the will of the people, and the magesterium is elected by the regional senates to perform a europe-wide function as well as reflect their needs.


This ancient and proven command and governance structure offers the stability and manageability to ensure that the European internal market is served with minimal corruption or nepotism and whatever problems arise can be measured and dealt with when they are still contained within the region. Never again can a large central bank collapse bankrupt states that have little or nothing to do with their business. Clearly a European Bank buying and investing in European debt is like you using your credit card to pay your credit card bill - it's nonsense and damaging nonsense at that.

We can't do nonsense any longer because we’re not getting any younger. 

No kidding, the world's population is ageing.  This is not an economic ‘time bomb’ as limited thinking technocrats fret about but a growing internal market which will stabilise the rest of our economic functions. Human ageing is inevitable and it is measurable which means that it can provide a foundation for an economic model; it's a good thing.  We know it is happening, we can accurately predict the rate of the expansion and we can educate the necessary skilled labour to deal with it in good time. WIN - WIN - WIN.  Clearly, we are living longer and we are accessing the health infrastructure more often and for more reasons. This is a growing internal market which will also feed into a massive export function as other advanced and rich global markets seek to enjoy European levels of care. Hello, sales dept!

For every developed country that has a collapsing birth rate there is an equally large developing country with a rising birth rate. Instead of trying to tie people down, the European continent can take advantage of a rapidly expanding and comfortably migrating younger population by unifying their working permits for a specific period of time. This will raise the living standards available to these workers after ten years of generous employment. Each economic zone could offer the same basic living standard not in money but in actual value.

This internal migration will also help Europe to cope with the external migrations that it is receiving right now. Human beings have migrated for a better life since the dawn of time. Nothing is going to stop the migration unless we are capable of improving the quality of life within the continent of Africa’s shores.  Much of what is causing migration to Europe is the fault of Europe’s own financial and political institutions. 

The level of global poverty now revealed in the statistics we see each day on internet memes and protest sites are the consequences of Europe's forays into these less developed countries and the denuding those states of their mineral and population wealth. The migration for a better life is simply people chasing their historically burgled wealth.  We can work with this.  We can develop, as China is developing in the African nations to encourage a return to their homes and to their economies. 

Eradicating poverty, actual poverty, actual hunger, homelessness and hopelessness is completely feasible and it makes the purest economic sense to do so. Most importantly Europe as it is today came into being by painting a very attractive picture of life within its union of nations. This picture promised prosperity, freedoms, access to legal and political representation as well as travel all over the continent.

All these promises can be delivered.

We just need to stop expecting a race horse to pull a plow and a dray horse to run in the grand national.  We need to create levels of budgetary oversight and authority that allows each region to expand and develop at their own pace, keeping an eye on preserving national or regional character and heritage.  Above all, Europe must remain a place that promises diversity, stability and opportunity for 740 million people and not just be a place that has a Starbucks on every corner.