Can we get an amen to that?

Per Harry Lime: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Nobody cares who the president in Switzerland is because Switzerland doesn’t actually amount to much of anything. Especially now that the average Grand Seiko is a better watch than anything the Swiss put out to market.

The President of the United States matters because the United States matters. It’s as simple as that. Switzerland disappearing tomorrow would be an annoyance at most… The U.S. disappearing tomorrow would be a catastrophe at best.

Disagree with you others about Switzerland. For a population of 8.5m to be one of the global hubs for Pharmaceuticals, Chocolate, Watchmaking and Finance is impressive. Their canton state structure and general conservatism towards e.g. immigration are also things we could learn from. Also all this success outside of the EU, making them a perfect example of why the EU can go fuck off.

I want to make the UK into a country where people don’t care who is president of the US.

Go for it. The fact that the USA doesn’t have to care who the PM of the UK is ranks high on the reasons to live here.

I’m not sure that is really what we want.
In certain European countries “the State” ie the civil service and the state institutions actually run the show. This is not necessarily a bad thing, Austria since 1945 has been pretty successful, occasionally a figure comes along ( Bruno Kreisky) who can bend the system to his will, but generally speaking the politicians have little real power. It is noticeable, for instance, when Merkel has a policy initiative ( eg Energiewende, “wir schaffen das” ) it all goes tits up: primarily because it is against the best interests of “the State”. This is no accident, the Allies imposed systems ( cleverly using existing institutions ) to prevent bald or moustachioed short-arses from driving their respective countries into the wall. De Gaulle saw that the 3rd and 4th Republics were hamstrung by weak executives and instable governments, which is why he created the sovereign-president on the US model.

In Britain if we have dull functionaries in power we end up with Major, Brown and May. Blair purposefully filled his cabinet with dullards and fools in order to emulate presidential power, because the ministers he appointed could not be trusted. The result there was Iraq.

Me personally, I am a Maoist ( or is that Chou-en Lai-ist) and believe in permanent revolution. If we don’t have this constant creative destruction we end up with the stagnation and missed opportunities that plagued the UK from 1945-79.

Well, Switzerland has the bank accounts in various currencies and physical gold owned by the uber-rich across the spectrum, Putin probably has some gold and money there, together with some Euromillions winner from Liverpool. Switzerland goes, all hell break loose.

Dennis,

“It’s about the only place in Europe that hasn’t been invaded by either the Germans or the Russians in the past 120 years.”

That’s because there was nothing worth taking. Wars are about natural resources: land to grow food, oil, minerals. Switzerland has almost nothing. The agricultural land is poor, there’s few minerals.

And I think that the more countries are like that rather than having resources, the more free market they are and the less people care who is PM. When there’s lots of resources and not much industry, you care who is in power to get a cut of the resources. You even see it in Europe. Countries like France and Italy are less free market than the UK and Denmark because they’re more about agriculture.

@BOM4

Suspect there’s some truth in the thesis that countries with pie have the potential for more arguments about who should get said pie … in a way isn’t that part of the issue with the emergence of the SNP a few decades back, disagreement over who should benefit from the North Sea?

“Countries like France and Italy are less free market than the UK and Denmark because they’re more about agriculture” is wrong, I think.

Partly because agricultural interests are just too small to drive politics, though clearly they’re more powerful in France than in the UK. But they’re not at the centre stage of things, even there. And the relative differences seem too small to explain much too – agriculture as a proportion of GDP is about 2% in Italy and in France, 1% in Denmark, half a percent in Britain. Now I’ll accept that the French agricultural lobby is probably rather more than four times times as powerful as the British one, so it’s not just about proportionality to GDP share, but we’re still comparing a 98% non-agricultural economy to a 99.5% non-agricultural one, is that really going to be the primary determinant of how free market the entire society is? Food has got considerable symbolic and cultural power to the anti-free market movement, but there’s more to the politics and structure of a country’s socio-economic system than that, surely?

@ Dennis “And as for the UK, well, that’s only because you had Hugh Dowding and The Few. Operation Sea Lion was ready to go.”

Not really. We had the largest Navy in the world at the time. The first few days on an invasion are key and Britain would cheerfully have sacrificed a big chunk of its navy during those few days to make sure the first Germans ashore were the only Germans ashore and that they weren’t resupplied. Much of the German invasion “fleet” consisted of flat bottomed river barges. A British battleship steaming past at full speed wouldn’t even have had to open fire to send most of them to the bottom of the channel. Few in the German army and no one in the German navy thought Sealion possible.

“The Few” was a heroic action and moral boosting but it didn’t prevent Sealion.

One turn of the 20th century British admiral had remarked “I cannot guarantee that the British Isles will not be invaded. I can guarantee that the invaders will not come by sea”

From an article on t’internet

The battle for Britain started in April 1940 as German troopships and the British Home Fleet converged upon Norway. Hitler was gambling that he could use the German Kriegsmarine (navy) to land his forces along the coast of neutral Norway in order to secure the coastal transport routes that took vital Swedish iron ore to Germany. Initially misreading enemy intentions as a mass breakout of commerce raiders into the North Sea and Atlantic, the commander in chief, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, finally realised a full scale German invasion was under way and ordered ships to Narvik, where two heavy defeats were inflicted on the Kriegsmarine.

Throughout the campaign, the numerical superiority of the Home Fleet and its allies was often offset by heavy German air support. “In the fjords, everything is to the bomb aimer’s advantage”, wrote one naval officer, referring to the fleet’s limited room for manoeuvre and the mountains screening enemy aircraft.

The Royal Navy had taken heavy but sustainable losses in the campaign, but the Kriegsmarine had lost around half of their ships including most of their destroyers. The damage to the rest of their fleet and the blockade of Trondheim also meant that no German capital ships would be available for an invasion of Britain in 1940. No wonder the Kriegsmarine’s commander in chief, Admiral Raeder, wrote “the losses… weighed heavily upon us for the rest of the war”. Churchill also wrote that after Norway, “…the German navy was no factor in the supreme issue of the invasion of Great Britain”.

The Kriegsmarine had lost half of their ships including most of their destroyers

German naval strength was so diminished by 26 May that Admiral Raeder’s chief of staff was forced to admit they would not be able to prevent the British Dunkirk evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). So it was to prove.

…around 338,000 troops were evacuated and the army was saved as a future deterrent to Hitler’s Operation Sealion,

As the BEF withdrew from the continent during May and June, the Royal Navy transported navy and army demolition parties to Europe with the object of destroying port facilities that might be used for an invasion and to destroy their oil stocks. These were the unpublicised Operations XD and XDA. Two million tons of oil was successfully denied to the Wehrmacht, and harbours including Zeebrugge were temporarily put out of action until November, with Calais and Boulogne unusable until September.

As Admiral Raeder acknowledged, the extensive damage to these harbours and their adjacent inland waterways precluded their immediate use as invasion ports and made the prospect of an immediate invasion impossible. Admiral Assman later told British naval intelligence: “We Germans could not simply swim over”.

By 4 June, Admiral Forbes was complaining about the diversion of destroyers and other smaller vessels from trade protection duties to home waters to await a German invasion. Both Forbes and Churchill were unconvinced that Germany had the capability to launch an invasion during the summer of 1940. Churchill later admitted to worrying more about the Battle of the Atlantic than “the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain”.

Admiral Assman later told British naval intelligence: ‘We Germans could not simply swim over’

Despite its losses, the Royal Navy was still ten times larger than the Kriegsmarine. By September, the British defenders had four cruisers and 70 destroyers in home waters and could quickly call upon the heavy ships of the Home Fleet, now based at Rosyth. The Germans were now down to eight destroyers with no heavy ships immediately available for support. The British were not content to keep their ships in harbour as a mere passive deterrent and made a series of daring raids on enemy invasion ports in a variety of weather conditions. Smashing their way into Dunkirk, Boulogne, Calais and Ostend, British warships blew invasion barges out of the water with point blank gunfire night after night.

On 11 September, every port between Antwerp and Cherbourg was entered and shelled. In October, Cherbourg was bombarded along with Calais where the harbour sustained 45 salvoes of deadly plunging shell fire without the loss of any British warships. With German barge losses amounting to the equivalent of his reserves, Hitler ordered the dispersal of his armada to safer waters

However, in order to build up the power of the RAF in Hitler’s mind, Raeder seems to have used ‘English bomber’ attacks as an excuse to have postponed a plan that neither he, nor the German naval staff wanted to implement. As Assman later wrote: “Naval staff also appreciated clearly that air supremacy alone could not provide permanent security against vastly superior enemy naval forces in the crossing area”. Even before the heavy bomber losses over London on 15 September supposedly brought about a postponement of the invasion, the Kriegsmarine war diary entry for 10 September already stated that the Luftwaffe was not doing enough to support Sealion. But the naval staff was not going to bother Hitler about it now because of expectations that the bombing would bring about a situation in which invasion would be unnecessary anyway. While no German military figure could state it explicitly at the time, the Germans had mentally given up on invasion before 15 September.

“Fortunately, Dowding and The Few rendered it academic.”

For which Dowding was replaced.

Perfidious Albion.

“See Pearl Harbor”

Hardly comparable. The Royal Navy weren’t going to line up their navy in neat stationary rows and go off on leave leaving “please sink me” signs on the sides of their ships like the yanks did.

The admirals and I will just have to disagree with you.

That’s fine. The Kriegsmarine’s well known inferiority complex with regards to the RN was not part of my consideration, although if Raeder had been ordered by Hitler, he’d have followed those orders. The point of who’d have won in a channel fight leading up to an invasion is debatable, and I was suggesting, not declaring (for once).

I think that Dennis missed the point. Nobody *in Switzerland* cares who the president of Switzerland is (for those not in the know, this is because it is a mostly honorific role and the incumbent changes every year, so it takes a bit of effort to keep up with “who’s president this year?”).

This is *most definitely* a good thing, and countries like the US and France (or Turkey or Russia) suffer from putting so much importance on one person. The Queen is important, but she doesn’t wield that much power.

In countries where things are mostly not bad, the chief aim of the political system should be to stop politicians screwing things up…

“One turn of the 20th century British admiral had remarked “I cannot guarantee that the British Isles will not be invaded. I can guarantee that the invaders will not come by sea”

Plainly, that admiral did not foresee the advent of a fifth columnist political class enabling the present cross-channel transits.

As I once said to NiV when he was in one of his “who do you think you are to decide who gets to live here?” modes: if only Goering had thought to disarm his men, stick them in shorts and t-shirts then push them over the soup in dinghies, he’d have had Sealion in the bag.