31st October 2012

One of the best cars that I ever owned was a DKW.

Built in Eastern Germany before the war, it boasted the famous Audi interlinked rings on the radiator grille, after the war marooned in East Germany, the factory built the Wartburg.

The car had a three cylinder two stroke engine and it was awesomely fast.

It was aero-dynamic in shape and its construction was described as a pillar-less saloon, the rear windows winding back into the doors to form a completely open sided aspect.

The model I owned was a Saxomat.

This variant had a clutch which was electrically operated by means of a button on the end of the steering column mounted gear shift. The fly wheel had a centrifuge which engaged as the speed of the engine rose and disengaged as the speed slowed and stopped.

So at Traffic Lights you could sit with first gear engaged and the engine burbling beneath the bonnet and then as you floored the accelerator the car would rear up on its back wheels and hurl itself forward with blistering acceleration.

It would have brought a smile to Jeremy Clarkson's face.

It certainly made me smile as I left another travelling salesman edging forward through the blue exhaust in his Ford Cortina wondering where I had gone.


But centrifuges work in politics as well as in engineering.

This may prove to have been an unfortunate time for the con-dems to choose to form not only a Government, but a Coalition Government.

In some future time, maybe a hundred years from now, a historian, echoing Gibbon's magisterial history of the Roman Empire, might entitle his history or her story, The History of  the Decline and fall of Europe.

Each chapter would follow the rise and fall of a particular European country as it traces the collapse of economic and monetary union, the collapse of markets, the demise of the common currency and the end of European history.

The chapter on the United Kingdom will, in all likelihood make galling reading for the grandsons and daughters of the members of the present cabinet.

In my last job I was invited to help as the advert had it, 'to build an organisation to break down barriers' it was a challenge that I responded to enthusiastically and with which I struggled for a number of years, until I realised that there were forces at work within the organisation that were simply beyond my or any one else's capacity to manage and which made it impossible to build the organisation.

Organisations, no less than countries or economic unions, are subject to centrifugal and centripetal forces.

The one forcing the energy to flow from the centre outward, the other forcing energy from the edges inward.

In both my legendary DKW, as in the charity I directed, the centrifugal forces were irresistible.

The car's fly-wheel flung out it's teeth, the gears engaged and the car accelerated. The charity continued to expend itself by taking on initiatives and then launching them as independent activities with their own management.

As a membership  'movement' organised into branches, even the branches saw themselves as independent of the centre.

The European 'Project' was based on the idealistic notion that centripetal influences could pull the disparate regions of Europe together into a single economic and monetary union and might even lead to a federal structure.

Czechoslovakia, former Yugoslavia, Spain and closer to home Scotland and Wales, offer examples of political centrifugal movements leading to new smaller nations embracing or seeking independence and nationhood.

Of course an independent Scotland might seek to be part of a wider federal Europe, it might not, Alex Salmond might not win the vote, Spain might remain as a single political confederation under the rule of its King.

It is clearly too early to tell how things will change and how the future will look but what is clear that across Europe centrifugal forces are at work.