irredenta

Anthony Hilton in The Independent:

The World Economic Forum in Davos was great about 20 years ago when you would get in a lift and find that the tall elegant upright guy sharing it with you was Nelson Mandela, or take the only spare stool at the counter to find you were alongside the US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

In those days most of the interesting meetings were relatively small seminars over breakfast, lunch or dinner, where you did actually get to meet and talk to seriously important people you would normally not get close to. And something in the mountain air meant they often said what they thought rather than what they thought they should say.

That’s all gone now and it is such a circus there is no point in going. Those in attendance are now given electronic passes which rank them by their importance and restrict where they can go, so the high and mighty are totally shielded from the low life. The great and the good on the panels spout empty bromides which demonstrate either how insensitive they are to what is happening outside their cocooned world or that they are prisoners of group think. And the atmosphere more than anything is one of uncomfortable self-importance and smugness, which seems to grow as the attendance by genuine A-list players goes into decline.

They, like me, probably takethe view that the pre-Davos discussions are much better value that the real thing.

At one, organised by Editorial Intelligence in London a couple of weeks ago, the American ambassador said the major issue facing the world was one of fairness; thefinance director of Rio Tinto said he was worried at the amount of political uncertainty and the possibility of new people in charge in half the countries in the Middle East, several of the countries in Europe, in the United States, and, most of all, in China. Someone else said we had not even begun to cope with the implications of the decline in western power and the rise of Asia, and the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf said that the collapse of the euro would mean a decade of pain, even in Germany.

All that for the cost of an Oystercard fare. Who needs to go to Switzerland?