Hubris Huhne

He lied to his colleagues and constituents; he lied to the police, the papers and the Courts. His former wife is left defending her case on grounds of marital coercion to lie on his behalf when he was caught speeding and she took the blame. His son's texts to him came to light today during the preliminaries to his trial, including one where he told his father "you are the most ghastly man I have ever known." 

And it was only when Chris Huhne, former Energy Secretary, failed to have this evidence excluded from his upcoming trial that, finally, he realised the game was up and changed his plea to guilty, declaring he will shortly resign his seat as an MP - we now face a curious by-election in his Eastleigh constituency where the two Coalition parties are at least the notional main contenders, though time may tell another story.

Huhne has form on changing his story - and not just on speeding fines. Just look at how he changed his tack on nuclear power from when he was in Opposition to Government - it didn't need a court case to alert us to this man's exceedingly dodgy character and the damage he was willing to inflict to further his career.

BEFORE 2010 General Election:

AFTER 2010 General Election, i.e., once he was Energy Secretary:

What a work is he! Hubris Huhne, a man who thought he could get away with anything at all - he just had to be sufficiently brazen. Unique? Certainly not. Among our utterly arrogant political class, his only real crime is that he got caught.

The Greek Myths: retirement at 55, lazy workers and a bloated public sector

On BBC TV on Sunday morning, our beloved Prime Minister, David Cameron, did one of these things he does so often to endear himself with the masses - he told a lie. Shock horror!

Yet, to be fair to the blue-blooded, blue-nosed Old Etonian, it may not have been a deliberate lie. It may well just have been another example of his arrogant sloppiness in half-baked factology, first detected with his rubbish about record national debt, etc.

Mr Cameron repeated something which a surprising number of commentators, politicians and the public believe - because, thanks in part to comedians, Conservatives and the corrupt xenophobic media, most British people seem to think that Greek people retire at 55 years of age, and that this has contributed to their economic woes which have so badly rocked the Eurozone and beyond.

In fact, this is a total nonsense.

May Zeus strike them! The neolibs fibs about Hellas

The average retirement age in Greece is over 61. As in the UK, some jobs do allow early retirement at 55, but in fact 86% of workers do not enjoy such a scheme. The normal state pension age in Greece is 65 years of age - the same as at present in the UK, though it is rising in both countries over coming years.

In the UK, because women still retire earlier than men and a significant number of men retire early (many at 55 or even earlier), the average British retirement age is just above 63 now, just a little older than Greece.

So, yet again, the rightwing mythmakers have been at work, stigmatising an entire nation as lazy good-for-nothings. The truth, of course, is that Greece is in trouble because it is tied into the Euro and no longer has any control over its own currency - if the drachma was still in use, they could have devalued it and be well on their way to fiscal recovery. But because they are tied into strict limits set by the European Central Bank, which has appointed the unelected neoliberal technocratic Prime Minister (the inappropriately named Mr Papademos, which translates as Father of the people!), Greece is unable to print its own money - hence it is trapped in the Euro-snare where the Central Bank rather than the elected governments calls the tune.

Greece's problems also stem from some rather dodgy lending to the previous New Democracy (conservative) Government by international financiers just after the millennium. But of course, the neolibs are not going to own up to that one, so they are more than content to pander to racist lies about lazy people and, of course, a supposedly bloated welfare state. In truth, the Greek public sector, accounting for less than 12% of all employees, is the 4th smallest in all the Eurozone countries and Greeks on average work over 160 hours longer each year than Germans and over 100 hours longer than the European average.

As ever, our politicians and media ignore the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny rich elite in Greece, in line with the trends in most other austerity-focused states, seduced as ever by the half-truths, lies and twisted statistics of our political-economic masters. They are myths we buy into at our own peril - because it feeds the plans of the elite to continue to grasp and command more and more of the wealth of all nations. And, as part of that, force all of our retirement ages up and up until our leaving does can be combined with our wakes.