Godfrey Bloom

Before Eurobonds become the next great panacea for the doomed single currency it might be as well to outline what form they might take and flag up some of the more obvious pitfalls.

A bond is only a promissory note. Its value depends on who issued it. A German bond is a sovereign bond, as is a US, UK or Japanese bond. We all call things by different names for historical reasons, gilts, T bonds etc. Corporations issue bonds. Tesco, Sainsburys, Diageo most of the world's leading companies. They pay interest, usually referred to as the 'coupon'. They are often graded by the credit rating agencies, Moodys, Fitch and Standard & Poor. AAA downwards. Past problems have been caused by erroneous ratings. 'Dud' or 'junk' bonds have been rated as A. When the issuer goes down the bond becomes either worthless or partially worthless.

This was demonstrated by the crash of 2008. Interestingly the bonds were so badly rated that it was tantamount to fraud. Yet no one appears to have yet gone to prison. Credit rating agencies are now so sensitive, quite rightly, that they are taking more care on how they allocate their grades. The USA is one of the first major economic powers to suffer the indignity of a down grade. Arguably a sovereign bond issued by a country with possible $65 trillion of potential debt ($14 trillion of acknowledged debt) should be rated junk.

Portuguese, Greek and Irish bonds have already been labelled junk. Spain, Italy and Belgium can expect to be downgraded soon. In line with the market's assessment of them. The UK is no better with private funding initiatives and public sector pension liabilities which indicate UK government gilts are B at best. Incidentally if public companies showed debt in their books in the same way as sovereign states the directors would be in prison for false accounting. So far so bad. People pretty well know most of this. So where does the Euro bond come in? The concept mooted is a bond underwritten by all members of the Eurozone, from chronically broke countries like Greece to the economically strong Holland and Germany. This would stabilize speculation against weaker sovereign debt bonds for a time which is the object of the exercise. However as the peripheral countries do not really have any money the ultimate debt guarantor is German and the few other smaller but stable economies.

In order to bring a Euro bond to market their first needs to be a central fiscal authority. The European Central Bank is not the Federal Bank of America. Nor indeed the Bank of England. It is a 'virtual bank'. The ECB just turned the taxpayer into the lender of last resort. A bit like mum or dad guarantee their offspring's first mortgage. This all sounds so simple. Yet there is an enormous elephant in the room. Lack of democratic legitimacy. It turns the Eurozone into a debt union. The 'thrifty neighbour' subsidizes the 'spendthrift neighbour'. The hard worker the lazy. The efficient the inefficient. All for a political experiment that itself has no democratic legitimacy. We are simply not our neighbours' keeper. We are friendly, sympathetic and on hand for natural disasters. But not crises of our own making. The Europe of Spring 1914 was more stable than today. It is no freak accident gold is on the upward march.

I have sat on the Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee now for nearly seven years. Every year they seem to distance themselves further from the real world. Very few members have commercial experience.

The latest piece of nonsense is the proposal to introduce quotas for female appointments. Forty percent it would appear being the bench mark. Quite why forty and not fifty, or indeed any other arbitrary number is beyond me.

Personally I believe any form of discrimination should remain outside the remit of politicians, who as a genre are far more prone to get things muddled than not.

After all selecting whom we marry, live with or go on holiday is a pretty discriminatory procedure. Even when we go to a restaurant and order food or wine we are being discriminatory. Indeed, when applied to fine art or music the term becomes complimentary. "He/she is very discriminating".

I have always been very discriminatory in whom I employ. It has given me over the years in the military, business and political world an enormous advantage. It has also left me with a very eclectic mix of professionals on my team. I would not dream of selecting them on the basis of colour, age, sexual orientation or gender. I cannot think of anything more offensive or patronizing. I have only one criterion which is the ability to do the job.

My last ultimate boss in the city was a female, a very well known one and with a reputation as being at the top of her international field. The boss of one of the UK's biggest energy companies is female. Incidentally so is her number two. Between them they have fifty years of experience in the energy industry.

Women though tend to prefer the professions and vocations, they predominate in the field of physiotherapy and radiography. They are now almost equally represented in financial services and the law with the ratio of women to men growing annually.

Similarly in the UK for the last two years women started more small businesses than men. They do not lack the entrepreneurial spirit.

To suggest they are too stupid, dull, lazy or incompetent to rise to the top without political assistance is disgraceful and immoral.

I wonder what Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher or Hilary Clinton would make of an argument that women could not make it on their own?

One also wonders how existing professional women would feel when the general public or even fellow professionals could not know if they were in office through experience and expertise or quota.

The UK Prime Minister and his predecessor both supported proactive discrimination in politics and less overtly in policing and the judiciary. Actually I can usually tell quota women because they are simply not up to the job.

Also, in order to discriminate in favour of a woman, the system has to discriminate against a man. Examples are already creeping into the European Commission and Parliament. True professional, ambitious and competent women must despair.

It would be dangerous also not to emphasize the appallingly anti-libertarian aspect of positive discrimination in the commercial or public world. For the state to insist by threat of coercion and punishment that a private citizen or citizens must discriminate either in favour of or against other citizens returns us to an unsavoury aspect of European politics which emerged in the 1930s. I, for one, do not want to go back there.