STANDARD AND POOR'S PREDICTS AMERICAN TAKEOVER OF...WELL BRITAIN

Because Sterling has lost around 25% of its value against the dollar in the last 2 ½ years, and the feeble recovery in the UK economy, British companies have become far more accessible to American corporations looking to expand their interests on this side of the Atlantic.

Following the Kraft takeover of Cadbury, Tate and Lyle’s buy over, and Gatwick Airport’s purchase by an American private equity firm, Standard & Poor, who did for the Euro when it looked likely that it would take over from the dollar as the gold standard currency, predicted last week that a number of well-known UK companies, including AstraZeneca, BAE Systems and Balfour Beatty, would soon be purchased by American firms.

It seems that Standard and Poor only have to predict something and it happens, such is the sensitivity of the markets. I think it’s time we examined just how much power these firms have, and exactly how they use that power and for whom... or what.

YET ANOTHER INQUIRY INTO THE IRISH CHURCH'S SHAME

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Emeritus Archbishop of Westminster, is going to head up a team of Catholics chosen by Pope Benedict, to investigate, yet again, how the Church in Ireland was able to cover up decades of sexual abuse by priests.

There have already been two inquiries and basically what they found was that in Ireland the Church was above the law, or indeed a law unto itself. I’m not sure that another inquiry, specially led by a priest who has himself been implicated in the cover ups, will be helpful or will in fact uncover anything that the previous inquiries by the Irish authorities has not.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Conner, when a bishop, was involved in appointing a paedophile priest to a job at Gatwick Airport, in which he would have contact with children. When the priest, Michael Hill, was jailed in 2002, victims sought Murphy-O’Conner’s resignation. He of course refused to go and instead issued an apology.

It seems that when senior people get it all wrong, and in this case seriously wrong, they issue apologies. When junior people make a mistake, they pay with their jobs, and sometimes their freedom.

In any case, I wonder if inaction on the part of the Vatican all these years will be seen to have been somehow mitigated by the amount of weeping, praying (instead of preying) and gnashing of teeth that has been seen to come from Rome in the recent past, since the horrors of what went on all over the world, and the complicity of senior clergy in hiding it, has become public knowledge.

Frankly I wonder that any senior clergy in, it seems, any country in the world, can walk about the streets with their heads held high.

Photographs: Cardinal Murphy-O'Conner; Pope Benedict