A whiff of something

Last week Cameron gave us his views on welfare. This week he sort of calls for a referendum on the EU. If I did not know better, if I did not not know, like the rest of us, that this government is supposed to last 5 years, I'd say our establishment is preparing for a rather shorter term political fight than that.

If Greece falls out of the euro and the euro begins to melt, Britain will have another general election and the outcome, as we stand, would be some sort of national coalition of the great and the good. But the Tories are not giving up without a battle and Cameron has no intention of devolving the leadership of his party to Gove or to anybody else.

This of course is how great items of policy are made. When the great issue of the day for the public is - what should we do about the City and the banks? Cameron offers us a possible vote on the EU.

There is, however, a connection that Cameron and the rest of his millionaire cabinet, are not so interested in confronting.

It was the City that set up the whole euro architecture of banking loans and sovereign debts. It was the City based hedge funds that 'rolled up' bundles of mortgages on Spanish property into parcels of security against the vast flows of 'investment' capital into Spanish banks. It was the City that set up French and German banks' 'exposure' to Greek debt. Just as it was the City that negotiated and 'handled' the vast loans to Irish banks, to Portuguese banks and to Diamond Bob and his robber princes in Barclays. And it was the City that translated the US property crash first into the Queen's English and then into Euroeeze.

The EU is at heart an organisation set up to defend European big capital against that of the US and Asia. But Cameron's goal is to save the City from European intentions to centralise their banking system in favour of its current world-wide 'freedom to roam.' Here in Britain our first step to freedom is to dismantle the City and to completely reorganise how big capital is used. Let's have a referendum on that.