And another thing--: the world according to Clarkson

by Jeremy Clarkson

  I read a book by Niall Ferguson while on holiday this year. It’s called Colossus, it’s about the American empire and it argues that already the gap between what America has and what it needs to keep its old people in burgers is $45 trillion.

  Now, I don’t know what a trillion is, but I do know that $45 trillion is roughly 10 times more than the total combined wealth of Germany, France, Italy and Britain.

  It seems there are three ways this vast deficit can be covered: they can either increase taxes, immediately, by 69 per cent or cut medicare benefits by more than a half, or stop all federal purchases for ever.

  I haven’t seen either John Kerry or George W. Bush suggest they’ll be doing any of these things. And that’s bad news, because the situation is becoming more critical.

  If nothing has happened by 2008, taxes will have to go up by 74 per cent.

  No president, of course, will ever impose any such increase, which means that with the certainty of Titanic’s fate once it had hit the iceberg, America will go spectacularly bankrupt. It is, according to the author, an inescapable fact.

  Long before that happens, however, the US will renege on all its foreign debt, which will bankrupt the entire world, causing famine and maybe even some kind of holocaust. So you’ll look a bit of a Charlie if you’ve spent the previous 40 years squirrelling away £30 a week for your old age.

  This is the fundamental problem with pensions. You are saving for a future you don’t yet know. You’re taking care of something that might never happen – your old age. You could live a life of thrift and then, the day before your pension matures, you could be trampled to death by a horse. Or win £17 million on the lottery. Or watch America go bust, taking the International Monetary Fund and your pension fund with it.

  What’s more, how do you know that the people you entrust with your savings will look after them wisely? How do you know they won’t raid the fund, spend it on a boat and then jump off?

  Every night commercial television is littered with multi-million-pound advertisements for pension companies. That’s your money – your nest egg – they are spending, trying to attract more suckers so they can build a taller, shinier office block. From which they can plan more adverts.

  The government’s no better. If ministers take our money, saying we can have it back when we’re old, how do we know they won’t give it all to Oxford Council so it can knock over bollards to make way for new ones?

  Believing that the chancellor will have a special ring-fenced fund to be spent only on pensions is as silly as thinking your road tax is spent on the roads. It isn’t. It’s spent on new NHS computers and, of course, on the civil service, which I see now employs more people than live in the city of Sheffield.

  Of course they’ll be fine. They are on the I’m All Right Jack Civil Service Pension Fund. But what about you? Well, I suggest you buy something stupid like a plasma television and sit in front of it with a big Twix and a packet of killer fags.

  Because, do you want to end up poor in a bankrupt world, full of civil servants? Thought not.

  Sunday 17 October 2004

  This is how the world ends…

  Crikey. Out of absolutely nowhere the Danes have announced that they own the North Pole, and just in case anyone gets any fancy ideas that they don’t, they’re embarking on a series of surveys which will prove it.

  Over the next few years they will spend £13 million demonstrating that the top of the world is connected by a vast underwater mountain range to Greenland, which is one of Denmark’s dependencies along with, er… the Faroe Islands and, um…

  Iceland. Oh no, hang on a minute. They lost that.

  So why, you may be wondering, after two centuries of sitting in a sauna have the Danes suddenly decided to get themselves an empire?

  Well, they reckon that, thanks to global warming, the ice cap will soon melt, allowing man to access a subterranean lake full of black gold. Brilliant. Denmark becomes Europe’s Saudi Arabia and everyone in Copenhagen will have a big Cadillac.

  Unless, of course, it turns out that there is no oil up there. And I foresee some other problems, too, chief among which is the notion that states can claim parts of the world just because they’re connected by some kind of underwater geology. I mean, on that basis Ireland could claim ownership of Tunisia.

  There’s another issue, too. According to a new(ish) book called Doomsday Just Ahead, the North Pole has not always been where it is now. And at some point in the next 30 years it’ll be on the move again. According to its author Ian Niall Rankin the last Ice Age was caused by what he calls a polar shift, and now apparently another shift is on the way, because the Earth’s magnetic field is dying.

  Fearing that he may be a loony, I’ve checked and, sure enough, in the past 35 years the field has lost 235 billion megajoules of energy.

  I don’t know what a megajoule is, but I bet you could run a kettle on it. And nor do I know how many megajoules the magnetic field had, to start with. But having spent an hour in the local library I’ve found that between 1835 and 1965 the magnetic field lost 8 per cent of its strength. So maybe Rankin is right. Maybe we don’t have much time left.

  Then what? Well, as I understand it, the molten middle bit of the world stops spinning and won’t start again until the world quite literally falls over. Somehow – and I really cannot be bothered to find out how – this restores the magnetic field again and all is well… except for one tiny detail.

  Nobody can predict where the top of the world will be. The new North Pole could be in Cardiff or it could – please God – be in Washington, DC. Scotland could be on the equator, along with Argentina, in which case the South Pole would be about 200 miles west of Hawaii.

  Or it could be in the middle of downtown Baghdad. Imagine the joy of that. Bush has his nasty little war to secure all the oil, which is promptly buried under two miles of ice.

  It would be prompt, too. There’d be no gradual shift to the new climate. If you woke up tomorrow to find Nuneaton was at the new North Pole you can be assured that your car wouldn’t start. It would immediately be 120° below and it would stay that way for the next eight or so thousand years.

  If this has happened before – and, according to Rankin, it has – then it would explain what Titchmarsh has been on about these past few weeks. In his series British Isles he’s been stomping about in the nation’s pretty bits, telling us how, before the drizzle came, Britain was jungle-hot and full of hippos, and then freezing cold and full of polar bears.

  It didn’t make much sense to my children. They learnt, long before they could multiply two by two, that man in general and General Motors in particular have been solely responsible for climate change. And yet here was Northern Alan telling them that the world has been heating up and cooling down for millions of years, all by itself. It was like learning that the answer to two times two is Paris.

  I’ve loved it, because this was Alan Titchmarsh, of all people, doing more damage to Kyoto than a whole herd of coal-fired power stations. In fact I’ve been watching the show with the engine of my car turned on. Just for fun.

  Sadly, he didn’t explain why Britain’s climate has been so topsy-turvy recently, but I must say Rankin’s theory about polar shift does look plausible.

  It would be good news for the Danes because if they do prove they own the seabed at what is now the North Pole, they may not have to wait for global warming to melt the ice. When the Earth falls over, they could well end up drilling in the tropics.

  The bad news is that when the Earth tilts, the sea, and I mean all of it, will wash over all of the land, killing every single living thing instantly. Unless you’re at the top of Everest, or in a mine.

  This means that it may take a while for Denmark to recoup its initial investment. More disturbingly, it also means that the world will have to be repopulated by Arthur Scargill and Chris Bonington. This concept is as ugly as it is unlikely.

  Sunday 24 October 2004

  Fight terror and look go
od, too

  So the Houses of Parliament are to be ringed with steel in an attempt to keep out terrorists – and burglars after those juicy expenses.

  All of the proposals seem jolly high-tech, but I assure you they won’t work. The boom that’s to be anchored in the Thames may well stop baddies from crashing a barge loaded with explosives into the outdoor tea room. But not if it’s a particularly large barge. And certainly not if it’s a hovercraft, which will simply ride over the obstacle and right up John Prescott’s trouser leg before exploding.

  Then you have the proposals for CCTV cameras throughout the Palace of Westminster.

  Why? So that security experts will be able to work out what the suicide bomber looked like before he became a thin veneer on the walls.

  Outside, the entire building will be ringed with an electric fence, but you can bet your children’s eyesight that the Health and Safety Executive will ensure it does not carry a death-dealing 4 million volts.

  Sure, a lower, less lethal voltage may deter Greenpeace beardies and Otis Ferry from breaking in and making their point, but I doubt a ‘slight tingle’ would be much of an obstacle for someone who’s spent the past three years in a cave dodging daisycutters and A-10 tankbusters.

  The intelligence services are said to be worried about someone driving a car bomb into the clock tower, which could then fall over, landing 13.7 tons of Big Ben on Tony Blair. But then our spies were worried about Iraq having nuclear weapons, so we can take these concerns with a pinch of salt. And anyway, if His Tonyness has to spend the next few years trapped inside a gigantic brass bell, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world.

  Anyway, I’ve looked, and if you had it in mind to bring down Big Ben you’d be better off with an aircraft. And this is not the World Trade Center. A Piper Cherokee would do the trick.

  The fact is that all the new security arrangements may well stop 100 terrorist attacks. But if they fail to stop the 101st, they will all have been a waste of time and money.

  The BBC, for instance, is supremely well guarded. The security personnel are programmed to allow nobody in, at all, ever. And if you do make it to the electric revolving doors, they will respond only if presented with a computerised photo ID.

  To get round all this, I simply enter the building every day through the post room.

  And I feel certain it’s the same story at Heathrow. Yes, it would be very hard to smuggle a pound of Semtex through the terminal, but I bet you could get access to the runways, and therefore the planes, by waiting till nightfall and strolling through the Terminal 5 building site.

  They can take as many precautions as they like at Westminster but they won’t think of everything, and one day someone out there will. More worrying, however, is what all these security arrangements will look like.

  Have you, for instance, seen the American embassy in Grosvenor Square recently? It’s been surrounded by hideous crowd-control barriers and by concrete blocks that, I know from personal and painful experience, can be barged out of the way by a small Peugeot so are unlikely to stop a large articulated lorry.

  Anyone wishing to gain entry to the building itself has to pass through the sort of prefab hut you might normally expect to find on a Nuneaton building site.

  I suppose there’s something to be said for making the security measures look temporary, otherwise people could get it into their heads – heaven forbid – that this Middle East business might drag on for years; but does everything have to be so ugly?

  The Palace of Westminster is one of the most famous and photographed buildings in the world, a position it may well lose if Britain’s notoriously low-rent civil service is allowed to decorate it with anti-aircraft guns, mines and concrete mantraps.

  Now I know money is tight. I know that artists are having to give their pictures to the Tate and that the £400,000 an hour being handed over to the Treasury by BP is being spent on MPs’ seventh homes; but is this not an occasion when some spare cash could be found?

  Could Richard Rogers not be employed to design fencing which blends the traditional lines of Sir Charles Barry’s building with the modern world of counter-terrorism? And instead of a boom trailing out into the middle of the Thames, why not build an elaborate sandbank, such as they’ve done in the sea off Dubai?

  Then there’s the question of the serjeant-at-arms’s tights. We’re told this is inappropriate combat gear and that they’ll have to be replaced with Vin Diesel’s body armour. Why? Can Paul Smith not design an eighteenth-century-style frock coat with a built-in machine-pistol holster?

  It’d be a worthless gesture, but at least we could lose our battle with the terrorists in style. Not from behind a chunk of nasty pre-stressed concrete.

  Sunday 31 October 2004

  The Cheshire charity rip-off

  Is the money going to charity or to the people who cooked the horrible food?

  I read recently that the noble people of Cheshire give more to charity than anyone else in Britain. But knowing Cheshire as I do, I worry a little about what it is they’re actually giving.

  I suspect that if such a thing as Cheshire Aid were to exist, it would not try to bring grain or farming equipment to the under-privileged of the world. The organisation’s lavish video would paint a different picture. ‘This small homestead in the Sudan had no water. But after all our hard work, look, we have built them a swimming pool, with a Jacuzzi in the shape of a Cadillac.’

  In a recent edition of Cheshire Life magazine the publishers ran a competition where readers could win ‘another fridge full of champagne’, and I fear this kind of thing could have an effect on where those readers might place the poverty line. ‘This poor African village had nothing. But thanks to the efforts of our fund-raisers in Wilmslow and Alderley Edge, it now has electric gates. Better still, the people who live there were all brown. Now, as you can see, they’re bright orange.’

  Still, 400 packs of Dale Winton face cream and half a million gallons of chlorinated swimming-pool water are better than nothing. Which is what I reckon normally gets raised at a charity event.

  I guess we’ve all been to the sort of evening where you’re expected to buy raffle tickets at £20 a pop and then, throughout dinner, girls in charity T-shirts arrive just before every one of your punchlines inviting you to place more £20 notes in one of their buckets. And then, with the auction, they start on your credit card.

  All these auctions are pretty much the same. Someone makes a heartfelt, tear-jerking appeal on behalf of the charity, and then up pops some sweaty, half-cut, minor-league celebrity who’s a mate of someone on the committee. That’d be me, usually.

  The first item for sale, which is normally a weekend for two at some godforsaken golfing hotel and country club, goes for £60,000, as someone desperately tries to impress everyone on his table with how much money he’s got, and how fervently he wants an MBE for giving it all away.

  I once sold a year’s use of a Jaguar at one of these do’s for more than the car was worth, simply because two blokes in the room were each determined to prove that they were considerably richer than the other.

  Better still, I once sold a weekend on a boat in Monte Carlo for £250,000, and the chap was so keen to impress, he handed over the cheque and said he couldn’t be bothered to go. I auctioned it again and got another £200,000.

  Of course, as you sit there with your slimmed-down wallet, full of spindly canapés, you begin to feel so poor and hungry that you wonder if you shouldn’t be on the receiving end of some aid. But you forgive the vulgarity because, of course, the money’s going to help some blind teenager in Rwanda whose entire family was butchered by an Aids-ridden terrorist.

  Is it, though? Or is the money going to the waiters, and the people who cooked the horrible food, and the people who printed the invitations, and the florist and the band, and the owners of the nasty country house hotel where the event is being staged?

  Time and again I’ve asked the charity representatives at these events how much m
oney they hope to raise and time and again I’ve been told that they don’t expect to get a penny. Just a mention in the local glossy magazine or, if they’re really lucky and some people from Holby City have turned up, maybe even half a page in Hello!

  What good’s that? How can a small photograph of some P-list celeb like me, with his arm round a bosomy, half-dressed soap actress, be of any possible benefit to the blind and cancerous orphans in Rwanda?

  And the problem’s getting worse, because there are now so many charity evenings – I have invitations to 23 on my mantelpiece – that the competition among organisers to be more and more lavish is fierce. Some are even employing PR firms, who regularly ring me offering big money – thousands – if I’ll turn up for the night and drink their Krug. This means the auction prizes have to be elaborate just to cover the costs.

  Soon you will be invited to buy a weekend for two on a nuclear submarine, simply to meet the expenses of the Brazilian fire-eaters who’ve just abseiled into the marquee from a helicopter gunship.

  I suppose I had better say at this point that some events do raise money. My wife, for instance, would certainly like it to be known that the cost of staging her annual do is entirely underwritten by Honda or Ford or Audi, and that every penny raised does go to the local children’s hospice.

  And this, I think, gives us an inkling of the way forward. When you’re faced with the choice of what events to attend, don’t ask which footballers are going and what sort of peacock will be used to garnish the roast swan. Ask only how much of the proceeds will actually be going to charity.

  And if you’re in Cheshire, what those proceeds will buy.

  Sunday 7 November 2004

  Now I’m an artificial hipster