Nice doing justice with you

You may have been wondering what has happened to ODHSNM recently. No, I was not co-opted to serve in the governments of either Greece or Italy. Much worse, I was doing jury service.

As such, I have not only some actual real world experiences to write about, but also some opinions that are supported by evidence – as opposed to the  steady diet of blind prejudice I usually feed you.

However, I must begin with a warning and a disclaimer. I am not going to tell anyone about anything relating to the deliberations of those juries I sat on, because it is an offence under the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

I am also going to be deliberately vague about when and where I did it and what cases I was involved in. Seems that blog accounts of the details of jury service are a bit sparse, and so even though I have a better grasp of the law in this area than some, I don’t want to go out on a limb and do or say anything dodgy (working from this broadly).

So, as a preliminary – while I await the input of those of my friends and readers who know the law better than me – here are some interesting factoids about jury service:

1. At the court I attended, probably about 50 new people got called up each week. Given that the usual term for jury duty is two weeks, that meant that at any one time there were about a hundred potential jurors locked up in a special waiting room, ready to be called. There is a LOT of waiting.
2. Whenever a trial is ready to start, 15 to 20 of the people get called out – apparently at random (more on the nature of "randomness" in the criminal justice system at a later date...). You may immediately be thinking, “hold on – not 12?” Well, you’d be correct. Those people then go up to the courtroom, where an official literally shuffles cards with all their names on, and the first 12 called out go and take their places. At this point, the counsel can reject any potential jurors they don’t like the look of – so this is the point that your swastika tattoos and copies of the Daily Mail come in most handy. Those rejected or not picked, get sent back to the holding pen.
3. Anyone who is on the electoral register and aged between 18 and 70 can get called up for jury duty. If you get a letter saying you’ve been picked, you can be fined up to £1,000 if you don’t reply to it within seven days.
4. There are nine lions on the Royal coat of arms. I counted them. Many times.

More will follow, pending legal direction. 

The Dukes of Moral Hazard

After praising the Greek government for sticking to its guns on a referendum on the bailout package yesterday, I was rather surprised to find that some 15 minutes after I had published it, Papandreou had changed his mind. The ODHSNM kiss of death strikes again. 

Suddenly George had decided that “democracy” meant something a little less Athenian and bit more Burkean than he’d previously been inclined to lead the world to believe.

By that, I mean:

1. Because the parliamentary opposition supported the bailout – no doubt after having their children taken hostage by G20 agents and spirited to a bunker in Cannes – there was, in fact, total agreement in the Greek polity on the whole “selling oneself and one’s descendants into slavery” issue.
2. The general public had their chance for a say when they elected their MPs. No point whinging about it now Stavros. Just eat your grass and be quiet. 

So, well done everyone - especially Existential Doubt for his article explaining WTF brought us to this moment. That’s the crisis over.

Well, call me paranoid and a prophet of doom, but I’m glad Elvira and I decided to book our upcoming break in a non-Euro country (the Czech Republic, since you ask).

While flights might be cheaper after the Euro has collapsed, I don’t want the added hassle of bartering for food, huddling around burning pieces of furniture in an exploded basement overnight and fending off marauding barbarians during the day on top of the usual stresses of a holiday.

Yes, well done EU and G20. The banks can rest easy knowing that there’s nothing you won’t do to stop them losing a penny. Things are going so well.

While we’re at it, EU, why not finish the job properly? All the governments – step down. Let’s get a Hapsburg on the throne and change the name back to "Holy Roman Empire".

Go George Go

For what it is worth, Greek prime minister George Papandreou can count on the support of this blog in his efforts to inject a little democracy into the EU’s attempt to set an all-time record for throwing good money after bad.

As Seumas Milne says in the Guardian today:

It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt.

Perhaps my economically-literate blogger friend Existential Doubt could offer some elucidation as to exactly where all this money is going and how it’s going to help?

Money has to be continually poured into Greece so Greece can give it to the financiers, who will stop lending money to governments that spend vastly more than they collect in taxes if they ever lose out, resulting in the collapse of social democratic welfare statist civilisation as we know it - which is only possible when states borrow huge amounts of cash with no idea about how to pay it back from financiers. That about right?

So, am I being naive or missing some obvious point if I can't help but see this as simply delaying the inevitable and impoverishing yourself in the process?

As Kenny Rogers would say:

You've got to know when to hold 'em - and know when to fold 'em.

Anyway, that's enough economics. Here's some politics.

Papandreou offers the Greek people a referendum on whether they want to return to the kind of economic and political colonisation by foreign powers that they spent most of last 500 years trying to shake off, and suddenly, he’s an irresponsible, weak lunatic because - god forbid! - if they are given a say in the matter, the people might decide that they would rather that the banks lose some money than be reduced to eating grass to survive for the next 50 years.

You can question the democratic credentials of a prime minister of Greece whose father was prime minister of Greece and whose grandfather was also...errr...prime minister of Greece. But he seems to have remembered that democratic politicians are there, when it comes to a moment like this, to serve the interests of their people first rather than international capital. 

This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.

That’s Article A of the Treaty of Rome, which led to the creation of the European Union. I wonder what went wrong...